Page 21 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

20

Don’t Regret This

Le Lavandou, September 1942

The house Léon has found in Le Lavandou is one of only a few built on the sea side of a headland that juts out into a tranquil, Monet-esque bay. It’s whitewashed, scrubbed clean of the filth of our time, shutters painted a soft verdigris. Flower boxes filled with silvery lavender scent the air, and midnight hangs above us like a velvet curtain waiting to be drawn so we can shut out the world. I want, so badly, four walls that are mine and Léon’s, and my children’s as well. There we would stay, imprisoned in happiness.

These are the kinds of thoughts I would once have poured into the piano, letting the simple progression from a major 1 chord to a minor iii weep for me. Now, I don’t know what to do except to feel it—but it hurts so much.

Léon takes my hand and some of my heartache slides out through my fingers and into his, his grip telling me that whenever things become too heavy to lift, he’ll be there beside me, the white flag I can surrender myself to.

“I’m here with you until I’m dead, Minerva,” he whispers. “And that’s all I’m going to say about it.”

“Minerva,” I repeat. The goddess of war.

I’m not a hedgehog tonight.

The door of the cottage opens and a woman and two lanky youths greet us.

“This is Bee,” Léon says, introducing the lady. “She’s a pilot, too.”

Another woman who’s joined the menagerie. I wonder if, after it’s all over and we’ve won— please God, let us win —these women will continue to do all the things war has allowed them to do. Lead. Climb mountains.

Inside the house, pale oak floors are dressed with rugs in shades of cream and blue. Huge urns filled with fresh-cut white bougainvillea mass like clouds in every corner. On the wooden table, a dinner is laid out that, in ration times, is like a feast. There’s wine, too, and all of the best glassware. It’s as if Bee knew, somehow, that tonight was special.

I catch Léon’s eye and there’s a hunger lurking there that isn’t for the food.

The two boys are firing questions at him, so I step out into the yard, which extends back toward the road. It’s edged with wooden frames holding up even more bougainvillea flowers that grow profusely, in defiance of war. They’re glorious. And the wood beneath doesn’t break or bend, as if it’s trying to tell me that sometimes it’s better to twine your stems around another.

When I step back inside, Bee points to a building in the distance. “We’ll be in the smaller cottage if you need anything.”

“You can’t leave your home to shelter me,” I protest.

She takes my hands in hers. “You can never ask enough of me. Or my sons.” Then she disappears out the door.

From the opposite side of the room, Léon says, “One thing I’m learning is that there are more different kinds of love than I’d known. Love for a family member. Love for an idea. Love for a country. Love for someone you don’t even know—but knowing they’re alive and fighting is enough to make you hope. You need to let people give you their homes, Minerva. You need to smile and thank them. They believe it’s their small role in the something greater you’re going to make happen.”

God . I want to slide my back down the wall, wrap my arms around my knees and cry for what I’ve done—for what I didn’t know I was doing. I can’t be the hope or the metaphor. What if I let them all down?

I glance desperately across at Léon and it’s like he understands how frightened I am, because he crosses the room in two long strides. At last I pull his mouth to mine.

Everything we’ve been holding back is finally unleashed.

I step back against the wall, drag the heat of his body against the length of mine. I want bare skin and he does too, because we’re both tugging at buttons, pushing fabric aside until his fingers splay over my spine.

In all my years of coaxing music from the body of a piano, I never once wondered what it would be like to be the piano—two hands playing hot jazz all over my body. Now I know.

“Léon,” I gasp, and he buries his face in my neck, murmurs, “Sorry…”

I laugh and throw his shirt on the ground. “I don’t want apologies, Léon. What I want is a bed.”

—

Afterward, Léon pulls up the blankets, cocooning us together, the intensity of everything that just happened still trapped between us. “You’re definitely not a hedgehog,” he says, and I laugh once more.

“You’re going to make fun of my name until we see the last German leave France, aren’t you?”

He grins, reaches out for his cigarettes, and I touch a fingertip to the bicep on the long, muscular arm that once made me think of an eagle’s wings, determined to memorize every part of him in case—

I cut off the thought and accept the cigarette, watching his eyes as the lighter flares. It’s so dark here in the blackout that I can’t see much, and I almost wish I hadn’t seen what that one spark of light just showed me. What we’ve done has deepened everything. Which is what I wanted—and what I was afraid of, too.

He cups my jaw. “Don’t regret this.”

“I don’t,” I tell him. “I only regret how much it will hurt.”

In the dark, where he thinks I can’t see, I know his eyes are blinking back tears. The deputy chief of l’Armée de l’air, someone who’s seen men die—who’s been inside a prison—has been brought to tears by the thought of us.

Dear God, why did we let ourselves become so vulnerable?

He burst into my life like a star, so beautiful I couldn’t turn away. But you don’t fall in love in wartime, unless you’re prepared to lose the beautiful things that you love. France. My children. Léon.

My darlings, precious and rare.

How many of them will still be here when it ends?

I lay my head on Léon’s chest and his fingers make vows over my cheek. We’ll all be here. I promise .

You were right stop Bla a traitor stop working for the Gestapo stop secure everything he knows stop we are issuing execution order end

“Execution order,” Léon repeats after I pass him the transmission from MI6.

It’s the morning after the glorious night we spent together. But today, there is no glory. Just more horror. In a war zone, execution is justified for traitors. But can I really kill a man?

That brutal voice inside me spits back: You already have. Schaerrer is dead. And Vallet might soon be, too.

In Pau last year I told myself it was time to be a warrior. I had no idea what that meant. Now, I think I do. Or…will I look back at this moment in another year’s time, on the cusp of doing something even more terrible, and realize I was an innocent still?

Gathered in front of me in my new ops room by the sea are Léon, Bee, Couscous, Ermine, my radio operator, and Lucien. So I focus on finding Bla. Not on whether I can pull the trigger.

“A couple of months ago, Bla was complaining to MI6 about being cut off from Alliance HQ,” I say, thinking fast. “I’ll radio him, tell him I want to renew contact and arrange to meet.”

“You’re not—” Léon only just cuts himself off before he orders me not to go anywhere near Bla.

Couscous actually smiles at Léon. “On this, we agree. Hérisson is not going anywhere near Bla.”

I exhale a long, frustrated breath. I know MI6 will say the same. You don’t send the network leader out to meet a known traitor. Being a leader means letting other people do everything that’s dangerous so the network never completely falls—because the network is more important than anything or anyone.

I shouldn’t have taken the crown of thorns if I couldn’t bear the pain.

“I’ll ask Wolf,” I say quietly. “It needs to be someone Bla knows, not someone from our second wave. Elephant can follow and move in when it’s time to trap him.”

Does it make it worse or better to ask something dangerous of someone who’d never refuse the task? I know that Rivière, Alliance’s loyal Wolf, will say, Of course I’ll do it.

I send a transmission to Bla. He replies; he’ll see me in Lyon in two weeks’ time.

—

Two weeks to relax—as much as you can when you’re a woman with a price on her head. That’s something I don’t let myself think about, just like I’ve shut the door on the memory of Béatrice’s cauterizing sobs, the feel of her little body wrapped around mine. But that night in the bath, when I rest my forehead on my knees, it isn’t only the bathwater that wets my skin.

What if I never see my daughter again? I can’t even remember what she was wearing the last time I saw her, carry only the impression of her weight, but not her warmth. I don’t think I even told her that I loved her—what if that’s all she remembers, the lack of those three words?

Then a thought stops me cold: What if Bla has children, too?

Homer taught us that war was Agamemnon, shining like the sun with the goddess Athena, golden too, at his side. But no—war is a woman with red eyes sitting in a cold bathtub, wondering if the man she’s been ordered to execute has a daughter, too.