War Brides

by Helen Bryan

  Frances would inherit her mother’s money when she married and the Falconleigh money when her father died. As for breeding, though her mother had been French, the Falconleighs were not to be sneezed at. Frances’s great-uncle had been a duke. Muriel Marchmont hated to think that poor Hugo might be forced to look for an American heiress, like Winston’s mother. Or that parvenu Nancy Astor. And one American in Crowmarsh Priors was quite enough!

  She considered how best to prod the young people along the paths she had chosen for them. Not for the first time she reflected on her will. She had no children and, other than Oliver Hammet, no relatives. She had always intended leaving her money, the house, and her shares to Oliver. Then he could marry Alice. Of course he already had the vicarage to offer Alice as a home. Of course he could marry Alice in the vicarage, but Glebe House was far grander. Besides, Muriel liked to imagine Alice sitting in this very room of a morning, beneath the portrait of herself as a young married woman wearing pearls and court dress, and remembering her fondly. In the fullness of time Alice and Oliver would probably name a daughter Muriel…

  As for Frances, Muriel decided it was incumbent on her to leave her jewelry to the future Lady de Balfort, the contents of Glebe House too, except for the morning room furniture and her portrait, of course. At Gracecourt, heaven knew, they could use her things—even the furniture was falling to pieces and the young couple needed to make a decent showing when they entertained. Vicars did less of that, and there was no point in leaving jewelry to Alice, who would look like a donkey in her pearls.

  She shoved aside the letter to Penelope Fairfax and took a fresh sheet of cream writing paper. She would dispatch a letter to Tudor at once. And another to her solicitor, instructing him to call on her as soon as convenient, as she wished to discuss a few new alterations to her will.

  She had drawn up an inventory of her jewelry after her solicitor’s last visit. Where had she put it? She rifled through a mass of papers on the desk without finding it. Where, for that matter, had she put her jewel chest in which she kept all but the few items she wore every day? The key wasn’t here either. She vaguely recalled hiding the chest somewhere as a precaution, in case Elsie’s follower tried to burgle Glebe House. Perhaps her memory wasn’t what it had been. But what was?

  10.

  Crowmarsh Priors,

  August 1940

  Evangeline had come to dread the long nights. She tossed and turned, awake until the early hours before she was sucked into an undertow of nightmares until it grew light. In all her dreams she was back in Louisiana. Sometimes she was at her old home in New Orleans. It was silent and dim, the furniture was gone, and each door she opened led to another empty room while she felt something stalking her through the silent house, something horrible, getting closer as she tried to run but couldn’t. Sometimes she was at school, looking out at the world through the convent’s little barred windows. But often she was in the country at her grandmother’s, leaving Laurent in the gray half-light before dawn. Mist lay heavy over the cane fields and smelled of pond lilies. She was late, had to hurry and dress, Grandmère and the old ladies who never seemed to go home would soon be up saying the rosary in the parlor, the servants would be awake—hurry, hurry before anyone saw.

  The house was just beyond the hanging moss on the next swamp oak, then the next, and the next. She began to run, faster and faster, but she couldn’t find the way back in the mist, although she knew it was close because she could hear Inez clattering pots and pans and smell coffee brewing. A mule brayed and a bell rang, but she couldn’t see anything.

  “Too late! Someone knows,” said Laurent, behind her. She whirled round to see who was there. They were coming closer through the mist, until they were close enough for her to see the human figures had Loup Garou faces. She turned to run again, but Laurent’s body swung in the hanging moss, blocking her way…

  Evangeline would wake with her heart pounding and remind herself all over again that she was no longer in New Orleans. Johnny was crying for his breakfast in Tanni’s room. The birds were twittering in the old pear tree in the garden. She would thump her pillows, prop herself up in the four-poster bed with its pink silk coverlet, and steel herself to wash hastily in the cold bathroom down the landing.

  Twenty minutes later, still damp, she would put on yesterday’s clothes, picking up the ancient gray jumper that had belonged to Richard’s father from the floor where she had dropped it next to her boots and trousers. Once Evangeline had been fastidious in her dress, taking pains to match frocks and shoes and jewelry, but now she hardly cared what she wore; in fact, the worse the better.

  She went to the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. She hated tea, but drank it for warmth, and waited for Tanni to come down before she made toast. Then she tried to think how to fill the day while she waited for Laurent to call and tell her to leave at once: this was the day. Her small suitcase was ready, packed with the few good things she owned, ready to go at a moment’s notice. It couldn’t come soon enough.

  At first Evangeline had thought she would go mad in England. She had meant to contact Laurent at once and tell him about the baby. But when she arrived, it had proved harder than she’d expected. Richard had whisked her down to his mother’s house in Crowmarsh Priors, and the telephone was in the echoing hall. A barely polite Penelope had come to stay, ostensibly to “help Evangeline settle in,” which meant watching her like a hawk. It was impossible to get in touch with Laurent, let alone make any plan to leave, with Penelope there.

  After a few weeks, with Richard increasingly away on duty and Penelope’s own war work demanding her return to London, Penelope had gone back to her flat near Harrods. Evangeline had breathed a little easier. She had rung Laurent at the Marseille office and told him where she was. They agreed she would join him in France as soon as he found a place to live. “Everything in Provence smells good in the heat, and from up in the hills you can see the sea,” he said. “I got my eye on a pretty white house with blue shutters for us there, trying to save some money for it.”

  “Us? But how can we have the same house?” asked Evangeline, wistfully. She hadn’t thought that part of the plan through.

  Easy, said Laurent. There were many North Africans in France, with dark skin like gens de couleur. They mixed with the white population, intermarried, had children, everything. “Long as you keep clear of the Fontaine employees in Marseille, we’ll be fine.” It sounded impossible, but Evangeline tried to imagine their new life, their children running about, Laurent coming home each evening. She patted her stomach. She had to tell him soon.

  Then she had miscarried at five months and was ill for weeks. When she was up and about again, pale and listless, she had an excuse to go to London—she needed to see a doctor there, she said. There she managed to contact Laurent in Marseille. Something new in his voice warned her that it was not the right time to tell him about the baby. His voice sounded drowsy. She wasn’t sure if he was tired or—could she be imagining it?—wary. She decided to wait and tell him in person.

  Evangeline had been surprised by how much she grieved for the baby who would have made them a family. As long as no one knew Laurent was colored and she was white she could not imagine a future for them that did not include children.

  “How much longer, Laurent? I miss you so much.”

  “Not long. I miss you too.”

  Week after week, Laurent promised they would be together soon. Then summer had ended and a curt telegram came from Penelope: she was to prepare a room for an evacuated mother and child. Two days later a tall, dark-haired girl, who looked very young but was holding a baby, stepped off the train at Crowmarsh Priors. The guard handed down to her a huge carpetbag. She looked around wildly as if she didn’t know what to do next, and the baby began to cry. Albert Hawthorne, the stationmaster, went to help her. When he learned who she was and where she was going, he chucked the baby under the chin and carried Tanni’s carpetbag himself all the way from the station. “She wants l
ooking after,” he had told Evangeline firmly as he put the carpetbag down in the hall.

  “Good morning,” Tanni had said carefully, in English, looking around the wide hall with the light flooding in, the curving staircase, and the Turkey runner on the polished floor. She sniffed. Thankfully there was no horrible smell of boiled cabbage and drains. At the door she had automatically checked for any signs saying that Jews were forbidden. Now she spied a small medallion of the Madonna and Child that Evangeline had scandalized Penelope by hanging in the hall and thought she had better make sure. “Jews are being permitted here?” she asked, shifting Johnny in her arms.

  “What?” said the girl who had opened the door. “Why on earth wouldn’t they be?” She looked surprised by the question—and Tanni was puzzled by her. She was wearing trousers and some sort of gray knitted thing with holes in the elbows. Tanni wondered if she was the servant, although surely a maid would wear a uniform. It was very odd. “Come on, I’ll show you where your room is. Here, give me the baby. Come to Aunt Evangeline, darlin’,” she cooed. “What’s his name? I got some of Richard’s old nursery furniture down from the attic.”

  Having Tanni and Johnny around distracted Evangeline a little. Waiting for Laurent’s phone calls, Evangeline moved restlessly between the house and the garden, keeping busy but never out of earshot of the shrill ring of the telephone in the entrance hall. She filled the long days weeding the garden, playing with Johnny, cooking food she barely touched, writing to Richard. She refused invitations to tea with Lady Marchmont or for drinks and tennis at Gracecourt Hall and made stilted conversation with whey-faced Alice Osbourne who obviously did not like her but who called to see how Tanni was getting on. Evangeline could see Alice hadn’t approved of the Madonna any more than Penelope had, but she didn’t care what Alice thought. Alice was just another irritant in the purgatory that was England.

  As soon as Laurent told her to come to him, Evangeline planned to put her wedding ring and the sapphire and diamond ring that had been Penelope’s, which Richard had given her as an engagement ring—even though they hadn’t had time to be engaged—into an envelope with the letter she had written already, saying she was sorry and that he should divorce her. Poor Richard. He had rescued her and he seemed to be in love with her, but it never occurred to her to stay with him. All she could do was look for the gold baby—maybe there was a way to undo the gris-gris—but it was lost. All she could think of was Laurent.

  Then war was declared, and autumn set in. Laurent’s rare telephone calls usually came late at night, after Tanni had gone to sleep. Evangeline could hear music and laughter in the background. He had made friends with a group of North African musicians who played in a waterfront bar. He often joined them at night after work, he told her, filling in for the saxophonist or the pianist. It reminded him of being back in New Orleans. North Africans looked colored, although they lived among the white French people and no one took any notice. “Not much longer, darlin’, just a little harder travelling with the war on. You mustn’t come by yourself. I’ll come get you soon.”

  “When, Laurent? I miss you so!”

  “Soon, darlin’, soon. I miss you too.”

  Just before Christmas Laurent rang to say that he was now living in Paris and mumbled about lodging with a musician friend. He was looking for a place for himself and Evangeline to live in the city. “You have to be patient, darlin’. Finding an apartment here’s not easy—” The call ended abruptly.

  Evangeline tried not to be alarmed as the dark days succeeded each other and still she waited. She tried to ignore the war rumbling away in Europe.

  One morning in May she dragged herself up from her usual nightmare-ridden sleep, woken by the clanging of the church bell. She was disoriented. She must still be dreaming, she thought, and pinched herself hard.

  She was definitely awake, in a strange, rather dirty room, dimly lit by a bar of sunlight falling across a worn but garish carpet. Nearby a church bell was indeed pealing, probably at the old church she remembered having seen on the corner. The window glass had been stuck over with rice paper to prevent it breaking if a bomb fell nearby. A man and a woman were arguing drunkenly outside. A milk van rattled past. There were footsteps in the corridor and someone was talking in a low voice behind the thin partition wall. She was not in New Orleans or in Sussex, but in London, and now she was blissfully awake. Laurent was actually beside her, his warm, naked thigh against hers, a little taller and more solid than she remembered, but sleeping soundly as he always did.

  Joy surged through her again as she remembered—the telephone shrilling in the hall the day before—it had been early afternoon and Tanni had nearly answered it. Laurent was in London! Evangeline grabbed her suitcase and rushed for the train, in such a hurry that she forgot to tear off her rings and leave the letter for Richard.

  Last night had been their first night together in more than a year, but this time she didn’t have to sneak home in the dark. Laurent said no one here knew who she and he were or that he was colored and she was white or that they weren’t married. They didn’t have to sneak anywhere. Thank you, God, and please, please, let the church bell be ringing because it’s a church bell and not because it’s signalling a poison gas attack or the invasion.

  In the dark she and Laurent had fallen hungrily on each other without pausing to draw the blackout curtains. Their hurriedly discarded clothes lay in a heap on the floor, his hat and their gas masks tossed onto the dresser. His saxophone case was propped in a corner, and her running-away suitcase, beside it, was still packed. She stretched out a hand to replace the cork in the bottle of cognac Laurent had brought from Paris. Then she snuggled back into the crook of his arm and buried her head in his chest.

  Now at last they would have a chance to talk about everything, about the baby and how frightened she had been in New Orleans, how miserable after her miscarriage, what had happened when Laurent got to Marseille. How they were going to live now when they got to France. But instinct told her that, first, they had to get used to being together again. It had been a long time. Of course Laurent still loved her as much as she loved him, last night had proved that, but now they could make their plans and the past would be a bad dream. She realized she was still wearing her engagement and wedding rings. She would send them to Richard with the letter today.

  But now…she sniffed and sat up again. Coffee!

  Laurent’s arm tightened. He nuzzled her neck.

  “Laurent! Can you smell it?”

  “Mmm—Schiaparelli?”

  “Even better. Coffee! Oh, Laurent, I bet it’s that Italian café down the street. Remember how, back home, the first thing you smelled every morning was coffee roasting? The tea they drink here tastes like dishwater. Sometimes I’d give anything to taste Creole coffee again. With a beignet to dip in it. I was just dreaming—”

  “About breakfast?” He yawned.

  “Um, sort of. In my dream Inez was making it.”

  He rolled onto his back, laughing, and stroked her flat tummy. “You always were a greedy chile!”

  She stretched luxuriously under his touch. “Mmm, so were you. Remember how we’d eat beignets until we were sick? You ate nineteen once. Way greedier than me.”

  Laurent folded his hands behind his head and considered. “Inez sure could cook. Waffles. And pain perdu. With boudin sausage. Grits on the side.”

  “Talmousses, with cream cheese.”

  He put an arm round her and settled into the pillow. “Beaten biscuits with country ham. I really liked those.”

  “And those lumpy rolls they called bullfrogs.”

  “Grenouilles?”

  “Yes, those. Philippe said we had to poke holes in the side because they had live frogs inside that would hop down our throats unless we made a hole in the bottom to get them out. We both believed him. It made Inez so mad. ‘What’s the matter with y’all, pokin’ your fingers in my good rolls like that?’” Evangeline’s smile faded. “The food’s awful in England
. I miss Inez’s cooking. Do you?”

  “I eat pretty good in France.” Laurent laced his fingers through Evangeline’s pale ones. The family resemblance was strong in the faces on the pillow, their builds, and even their hands with the long index fingers. Evangeline’s hair was dark, spilling over her shoulders, while Laurent’s was light copper, close-cropped, and curly. His hand was strong and sensitive, a musician’s. A lover’s.

  He played thoughtfully with Evangeline’s big sapphire and diamond ring, turning it round her finger. “You sound homesick, well as hungry. Maybe they’re the same thing. Me too, sometimes, when it rains and Paris is nothing but wet stones and strange faces and I think about how everything used to be warm and folks saying ‘hi’ and—but it’s different for you. You’re a married woman, got other things to think about. Look like your husband takin’ good care of you.” He gave the ring a last twirl.

  “I wasn’t really married. Marriage by a ship’s captain doesn’t count in the eyes of the Church, so I can get an annulment and then we can get married when we—”

  “Us? Get married?” He stared, looking surprised.

  “Well…we can’t just live together, Laurent.” Evangeline thought about the house in Provence—no, Paris—full of children and Laurent coming home to her every night. How could they do that if they weren’t married? She blurted out, “But…er…we have to…I almost had a baby, you know—meant to tell you—but then I had a miscarriage…”

  “When?”

  “Last summer, while you were in Marseille. I guess it was for the best; Richard might have made a fuss about it, thinking it was his and—”