Page 49 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

48

King of Courage

Paris, September 1944

We return to Paris and, rather than searching for a cave, we’re allowed to requisition any building we like for our HQ. For the agents’ sake, I choose a luxurious apartment on the Champs-élysées. We hang a sign right out in the open on the front door that proclaims, Alliance Intelligence Service .

But while France might largely be free, the rest of Europe isn’t. My agents are still in prison in enemy territory, and they’ll be released only when Hitler is dead. So I keep liaising with London and with Patton, answering their questions about mines on bridges lying in wait for our troops, considering their request to send a team of agents to scout ahead of the Allies, right into Germany.

I look up when I hear a familiar voice behind me.

“Lucien!” I cry, kissing his cheeks. “Ready to wear your robe and put your feet up?”

He laughs, but there’s something in his eyes…

My smile falls away. Not you, I want to plead. You’ve done enough .

“I want to set up our first sector across the Rhine,” he says. “If Eagle was here, he’d push on into Germany. You know he would.”

Yes, he’d be at the head of the Allied advance in a silver airplane, a navigational star guiding our troops.

Of course the man Léon trained won’t stop before the fight is over. Once again I see that the things we love in people are also the things that will hurt us the most in the end. Lucien’s honor is a mirror of Léon’s, and his mother wouldn’t have had it any other way. As leader of Alliance, nor would I.

It’s only the woman in me who cries out, No!

“Send a message once you have a base. I’ll arrange a supply drop for you,” I tell him, trying to keep my voice steady. “And, Lucien…” My voice cracks. “Find them.”

Léon. Josette, Lucien’s mother. The remarkable girl Amniarix. And all the rest.

“I’ll find as many as I can,” he swears.

He shoulders his pack and sets off, sunlight glinting on his golden hair, crowning him King of Courage.

—

The minute the note I’ve been waiting for arrives at HQ, I run back to my apartment, only just able to make myself stop and scratch at the door instead of bursting in, because I know how terrifying a suddenly opened door still is to everyone in Alliance.

It opens cautiously. “Ermine,” I start to say, then stop. I can call her Monique now, openly. “What a habit to break,” I whisper. “To not use animal names.”

“This will make you feel better,” she says, stepping aside to show me the person waiting behind her.

My son. Mine and Léon’s. He hasn’t seen me for fourteen months. If I rush at him, I might make him cry and I won’t be able to bear it.

I crouch down in the doorway. “ Bonjour Achille .”

He holds on to Monique’s leg and peeks out at me.

I proffer a khaki-colored bear that I made out in the field near Verdun from scraps of uniforms. It’s stuffed with fleece from inside another bear, one handed to me by a woman who told me that her child had died earlier that year. She’d seen me sewing and had recognized a mother’s pain.

“This is…” I pause and turn the bear toward me. The one animal we never had in our ark was a bear. He could just be Bear. But instead I hear myself say, “Lion.” In French, the word sounds almost like one man’s name—Léon.

“Lelelelelelelele,” Achille chants.

He pokes a finger into the bear’s belly and giggles—and my heart finally breaks.

—

In Paris, the swastikas are burned, German street signs crash to the ground, and the very idea that anyone ever supported Pétain’s 1940 armistice is buried beneath voices shouting DeGaulle’s name. At Alliance headquarters, surviving agents enter with smiles and hugs and euphoria and tears. Soon, Crane arrives from England on a plane that flies during the day and doesn’t have to land by moonlight on an L-shaped runway lit only by flashlights.

We embrace and of course we cry. Into our opulent headquarters come people from the British Embassy, as well as naval officers, RAF officers, even men in kilts: a veritable parade of uniforms and boots and buttons and brass. I hover at the edges of my own party until Crane steps into the middle of a great circle and reads a speech about extraordinary and heroic achievements. He attaches words to my name like fighter, strategist, leader, warrior.

“And brave to the point of making everyone at MI6 tear their hair out,” he finishes with a smile, indicating his own balding pate. Then he pins on me a cross imprinted with the profiles of a king and queen, encircled by a pink ribbon.

The Order of the British Empire.

There are so many sobs stuck in my throat that I have to stand with my lips pressed together and just stare, hoping he sees in my eyes everything I cannot say.

When the cheers ring out, I cower; I’m still not used to so much noise. Still can’t quite remember that the Gestapo aren’t about to charge in.

“What can we do for you now?” Crane asks after the champagne is poured and I’ve composed myself.

“I need a parachute drop sent to Lucien. Men to search for Lanky. And”—I inhale shakily—“I need you to help me find Léon. And get my children back from Switzerland.”

—

Not long after, in the little apartment I’m living in with Monique and Achille, another gift arrives. It’s a gift I both long for and am terrified of—the gift of a fourteen-year-old boy named Christian and a twelve-year-old girl named Béatrice.

They haven’t seen me since 1942.

The door opens. My mother and sister stand there. Beside them is a boy who’s taller than they are and a girl who’s about the same height. I brace for the children to stare, to wonder who I am. I brace for them to walk right past me.

But all of a sudden, there are two people in my arms and I’m holding my children and, my God, they still smell the same and it’s the scent that does it, making me burst into tears. We’re all crying and laughing and hugging and trying to look at one another all at the same time when suddenly there’s a third person in the middle of our embrace, holding my leg and looking up at me with a worried face, as if he cares that I’m crying and wants to help. That third person, little Achille, who’s only ever called me Mee-Mad, baby shorthand for Marie-Madeleine, howls, “ Maman! ”

And I wrap him in my arms and squeeze him as hard as if we’ll never embrace again.

It’s almost too much happiness. Especially when Béatrice says to Monique with a grin, “You’re still my favorite animal,” and Monique beams like the young woman who joined us in Béatrice’s hospital room in Toulouse in 1942.

If tears aren’t enough to express true sorrow, then smiles aren’t enough to embody the quantity of my joy. But I smile and I laugh knowing that, here at home, I don’t have to lead. I just have to love, which is so very easy to do.

And with Achille in my arms, I send an order to his father: Stay alive, Léon. We’re coming. It’s time you held your son .