Chateau of Secrets: A Novel (8 page)

I glanced over at Mrs. Vale and her lips were pressed into a tight line. How could she live like this? How could they all continue to pretend? My parents had been married for thirty-two
years, but if my mom thought Dad was cheating, she would never let him—and certainly not the woman he was sleeping with—back into our home.

Mrs. Vale stood and clapped her hands. “Who’s ready for dessert?”

I looked down at my plate. Like the rest of the family, I’d barely begun to eat, but she left us no choice. “I’ll help you clear the dishes,” I said as I stood.

Twenty minutes later, Austin and I leaned against the banister of their deck, looking down at the lights of Richmond.

He reached for my hand. “You know I love you.”

“I do, but I wish you’d told me about the fund-raiser in New York.”

He covered my hand with his. “I thought I did.”

“I would have remembered—”

“I’m sorry, Chloe. It’s been so crazy.” He squeezed my hand. “I wish you could go with me. It’s a formal dinner and dance at the Plaza.”

“Are you leaving Tuesday morning?”

He nodded.

I smiled at the thought of the two of us indulging in first class together, dreaming about where the future might take us. “Perhaps we can fly together. It would be like stealing away for a whole hour.”

“I wish we could,” he said, squeezing my hand again. “But my flight’s going into LaGuardia.”

I sighed. I had to go through John F. Kennedy for my connection to Paris.

“We’ll drive to the airport together,” he promised. “Just the two of us.”

I heard Megan’s laughter below the patio, and my stomach
churned. I inched my hand away from his. “How can you tolerate your father’s—
behavior
?”

Austin leaned forward, his arms resting on the banister, his voice low. “Dad will do what he wants to do.”

“But he’s cheating on your mom,” I said, my voice clipped. I didn’t care if Megan or Justice Vale or anyone else in the family heard me.

“It’s not really cheating if Mom knows.”

“That’s disgusting, Austin. He’s on Virginia’s supreme court, for heaven’s sake. He’s supposed to be a pillar of all that is right.”

He stood up, pulling me close. “It’s how they do their marriage.”

“It’s not how we will do our marriage,” I said, melting into him.

“We’ll be more like your parents.” He stroked my arm. “I need you, Chloe. You know that, don’t you?”

“You just need a wife . . . ,” I said, teasing him.

He kissed the top of my head. “You’re stuck with me for life, for better or worse.”

“Mostly better, I hope.”

He pulled me in front of him, and I leaned back against his chest. “It will be the best,” he promised.

And I believed him.

Chapter 9

R
ain pecked at the dozen panes on Gisèle’s bedroom window, and she pressed her nose to the glass, trying to spot any Germans patrolling the river valley below, but the valley was still. Her gaze went up to the gray sky and then to the tower of Saint-Lô’s cathedral.

She’d slept little last night. The family’s Delahaye was sitting in the old carriage house that had been remodeled as a garage, but there was no sign of her father. She tried to cling to the hope that Philippe had returned after the bombing and taken Papa away with him. Perhaps they were both searching for her. Once the telephone lines were restored, she told herself, both Papa and Philippe would call.

Still, she felt scattered, not knowing whether she should stay and wait for Papa and Philippe or go look for them. Life, it seemed, had tipped over on its side, cracking into tiny pieces. Somehow she had to fit it back together again.

After she went to the carriage house, she visited the
chapelle
—both to pray and to leave the black bread and a letter for Michel on the ledge, telling him all that had transpired. If he hadn’t left yet, she would take him Émilie’s food this morning.

Last night she’d taken a hot bath with lavender bath salts, cleaned her wounds, and washed her hair with the honey-scented shampoo her mother had loved before setting her hair with
curlers. She had blue eyes, like her mother, but the skin under her eyes was tinted purple from her restless night.

This morning she splashed water on her face and quickly powdered her nose and cheeks before studying herself in the washroom mirror. It seemed trivial to be concerned with her appearance, but her mother would have told her to face this day—and any Germans in it—with dignity. She’d been born into an aristocratic family, Mother would have said, and the enemy would never respect the lineage of her family if she didn’t respect herself.

She powdered her face again.

Émilie was already bustling in the kitchen, and Gisèle drank a cup of coffee before eating the last slice of bread, slathered with jelly made from the hawthorn berries. As the rain drizzled down the window, the two women kneaded the rye and wheat flour together to make four more loaves of bread.

It felt strange to be in the kitchen, working alongside the woman who’d been her mother’s favorite servant. The camaraderie eased the loneliness in her heart, and Émilie seemed to be enjoying her company as well.

Émilie talked about her father, who’d worked at the PalaisRoyal until his death in 1934, and about her sister and nephews, who lived in Cahagnes. They both talked of the family members they’d lost a little more than twenty years ago, when France defeated Germany during the Great War.

Gisèle had been born only three months before the Great War ended, so she only knew the stories her parents told her, but Émilie remembered well the horrors of that war, the millions of young men France lost to the battles, the blood of their countrymen spilling over French soil.

“We must defeat the Germans quickly this time,” Émilie said as she pounded the dough in front of her.

Gisèle mimicked the way Émilie pounded her bread. “What will happen if we don’t defeat them?”

She sighed. “I fear this Hitler will make us pay dearly for the past.”

“Half of France wasn’t even alive during the Great War.”

“It won’t matter to him.”

Gisèle had read the first part of Hitler’s book
Mein Kampf
when she was at the university. One of her professors extolled the honesty of Hitler’s struggle, the fervor of his words, but the hatred in the man’s writing—his soul—appalled her. Hitler asserted that the Aryan race—the blond-haired and blue-eyed men and women—was elite. The Jews were parasites, dirty, wily, repulsive, liars. The mortal enemy of the master race.

She couldn’t finish reading the book.

Hitler might make the French pay for the Great War, but there was something more sinister about the man than revenge.

Gisèle turned over the dough in her hands. “I am going to bike into Saint-Lô this morning, to see if I can find a pay phone that works.”

Émilie stopped kneading. “You can’t go alone.”

“I won’t be gone long.”

Émilie turned over the dough in her hands, studying Gisèle for a moment before she spoke again. “What other food will you need to take to the orphanage?”

Gisèle pressed her lips together. The only thing her brother had ever requested was the local Calvados, but he couldn’t live forever on apple brandy. “Some cheese, I suppose, and hardboiled eggs or meat.”

The exhaustion in Émilie’s eyes fled with her smile. “You remind me of your mother.”

Her words warmed Gisèle to her core. “Thank you.”

“You must take more than bread and cheese.” Émilie opened the pantry door and rustled inside it before she shut the door with a loud huff. “But we are lacking in almost everything.”

“How do we get—” Gisèle started to ask, but Émilie kept talking.

Émilie moved up into the hall and Gisèle followed her to the front door. “I will go ask the Polins for some eggs and carrots from their garden and perhaps some flour.”

The Polins lived farther up the lane, in the house where their family had lived for almost fifty years while they farmed a portion of the land for the Duchants.

“Will you return?” Gisèle asked. She hated this feeling of desperation, but she needed Émilie even more than she had the last time she’d walked out the door, on the way to her sister’s house.

Émilie stepped outside and opened her umbrella. “I won’t be longer than an hour.”

The rain tapered into a drizzle until the summer sun chased it away. Gisèle zipped up her boots under her slacks and retrieved her bicycle from the carriage house. Months ago she would have put a saddle on Papillon Bleu, her Anglo-Norman mare, but Papa had sent away all their horses when Germany began to threaten the Maginot Line. In hindsight, Papa should have insisted their entire household relocate to Lyon when he sent away their horses, but he hadn’t really thought the Germans would make it this far west into France.

She wouldn’t linger in Saint-Lô this morning, only long enough to learn if the Germans were gone. And if they were, she would search for a working pay phone. If Papa were in Lyon, he would be worried sick about her.

The sun warmed her bare arms as she pedaled under the narrow lane of elm trees up into Agneaux. One main street divided the village, and it was strewn with clothes and toys and broken bicycle
wheels. She pedaled quickly through the commune, along rue de la Cavée, until she crossed the bridge into Saint-Lô.

A rank of tangled hedgerows, twice her size in height, usually fenced in animals and gardens on both sides of the street, but she didn’t hear the bleating of sheep or the bellowing of cows or even dogs barking today. Instead of automobilists and bicyclists clamoring up and down the road, automobiles sat abandoned in the middle of the road and bicycles lay on the sidewalk.

The earlier mayhem had diffused into an eerie calm.

Instead of pedaling into the town center on the road, Gisèle found a break in the hedges and biked along its bumpy backside. There was a telephone booth near the police station. She would call Tante Corinne from there.

Peeking through another break in the hedgerows, she surveyed the cobblestone street between the shops and primary school. Glass and debris covered the sidewalks and empty vehicles.

Had everyone in town fled or were they all hiding in their homes?

A troop of German soldiers marched from around the corner, into the street, the silver butts of their rifles gleaming in the sunlight. Their heavy boots pounded together on the stone.

Then a dark gray tank rounded the corner, a soldier perched above an enormous machine gun.

She watched as the gunner scanned the high buildings on both sides of him first before turning toward the hedgerows. Gunfire popped on the street, and she ducked back under the thick hedges with her bicycle, losing herself again among the rows.

The Germans, it appeared, were in no hurry to leave Saint Lô.

“H
ello, Mémé.” I bent to kiss the bony cheek of my grandmother.

Officially, she was the Honorable Gisèle de Bouchard Duchant Sauver. Hers was a lofty title for a little woman, but in spite of her age and illness, my grandmother still had the elegance and often the attitude of a French noblewoman. The air of superiority sometimes flared in her later years, but we all adored her, even when she liked to tell us exactly what we should—or should not—do.

“She escaped again yesterday,” Pamela James, her saint of an aide, said from the other side of the bed. “I found her petting a cat—”

“Not just any cat,” Mémé said, spanking Pamela’s hand. “His name is Shadow.”

Pamela’s smile was strained. “I found her petting
Shadow
, down by the pond.”

“I went to see Papillon Bleu.” Mémé scooted herself farther up on her mound of pillows. “But I wasn’t going to ride her until today.”

My grandmother hadn’t ridden Papillon Bleu or any other horse in two decades, but I wasn’t going to remind her. “Now, Mémé, you can’t go riding without Pamela.”

A stream of French poured from her lips, telling me it was none of my business when she rode a horse or with whom.

“Pamela needs your help,” I insisted.

Mémé scrutinized Pamela as if to ascertain whether or not the woman before her really required her assistance.