Page 33 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

32

Forever

London, September 1943

The night before Léon leaves on Operation Ingres, the moonlight flight that will take him to France and bring the duke of Magenta to London, we eat, we dance, we make love. We do ordinary things, even though we are not ordinary.

In the afternoon, the driver takes Léon, Magpie, and me to the Bertrams’ cottage. English countryside rolls past. Narrow roads, green hedges, redbrick houses. The rubble of bombings, left to decompose like animal droppings. Then…

Pink heather. Pink heather in a vast field backdropped by an extraordinary sky.

My lunch is in my mouth.

I swallow, breathe, stare, try to scream, Stop! But my voice doesn’t work. Nor does my mind. Even my heart isn’t beating—it’s like I’m already dead, right here in this moment of watching the future that’s been showing itself to me for months finally step into the present.

Then the heather is gone and I whip my head back to see if it was just a hallucination. Why didn’t I pay more attention to the details? Look for all the ways it wasn’t the same as my dream?

Because I haven’t dreamed this. There’s no Gestapo in Britain. No planes land in the field we just passed. Léon isn’t going to step into it. The only thing the same was the heather, incandescent behind us, like fresh skin before the knife falls.

I search wildly for Schaerrer’s ghost or Vallet’s, one last remaining angel, to tell me what to do. If I tell the driver to go back to London, Léon and Magpie will think I’ve gone mad. They haven’t even looked at the heather.

If I tell Léon he can’t go to France because I just saw pink heather and I’ve been dreaming he’ll be captured in a field of pink heather, he’ll just ask me how many other things I dream of every night and pay no attention to. And Magpie, our pragmatist, will scoff.

I’ve probably seen pink heather many times while I’ve been here, maybe even this same field the day after Léon arrived and we drove to London. No rational person believes that dreams are real.

But I hardly say a word for the rest of the drive.

Barbara welcomes us warmly, saying, “Come and have dinner,” as if she thinks food will cure our worries. But food is not magic.

She puts bacon and eggs on our plates. We push them sideways, in circles. Even Magpie hardly eats.

It is 9:58 p.m.

9:59.

Ten o’clock.

“Time to go,” the major says.

The Bertrams and Magpie leave the room. I have thirty seconds, the most important seconds of my life. I don’t know what to do with them. I love you ? Léon knows that. I’m scared ? He knows that, too. I miss you .

More things I don’t need to say.

We stare at each other. Then he reaches for the chain around my neck, letting the ring spill into his hand.

“My wife,” he says simply.

I pull off the chain, put it around his neck, tuck the ring into his shirt. “My husband,” I say. “Forever.”

—

The waiting begins.

Barbara talks about her knitting, about her childhood, and then, gradually, she asks me questions about Léon. At first my answers are brief. One word, two at most. But then I tell her about when I first saw him, a head taller than all the others, striding into a room, making me stare. I tell her he was the only person in the world to ever ask me why I was doing this, that he wants to wash sunsets golden for me, but that I would rather there were no more sunsets and he was alive.

One o’clock strikes.

My fingers twist against the backs of my hands, trying to tear a hole through my skin. It’s too early for news. But still I expect it. I expect the phone to ring and the major to answer and for him to tell his wife to make tea for one guest, Maurice.

One-thirty ticks past.

Barbara holds my terrified eyes in her calm ones.

1:45 a.m.

1:50.

If I could give my life to make the phone ring, I would.

1:59.

The phone shrills.

The major listens, then hangs up.

“Tea for the same two guests,” he says.

My exclamation of shock fills the room.

A few minutes later, Magpie and Eagle arrive, starving, tired, and cross. Léon hurls whiskey down his throat. Magpie tears a bite off one of Barbara’s cream buns.

“The moon was as bright as the damn sun,” Léon says furiously. “Sorry,” he apologizes to Barbara, who waves off the language. “We flew over the landing field three times but nobody was there.”

I don’t care. I care only that the pink heather has no power.

But then I realize—we have to go through all of this again tomorrow.