Chapter 41
FORTY-ONE
LUCY
After ending the call with her father, Lucy had gone upstairs to the flat to lose herself in the memory box again. She loved her father and knew he’d gone above and beyond to fight her corner. Now she was giving up everything he’d wanted for her. But she needed to walk her own path.
She looked at Margot’s diary again, staring at the asterisk on the date of the executions as if it would suddenly reveal its secret, or jog her thoughts.
But nothing came to her, and her gaze moved on.
It looked like a slightly bent circle had been drawn round one of the dates not long after the execution.
Lucy fixed her attention on it, and it slowly resolved into a heart.
She wondered if this signified when Margot had met Emil, who Lucy knew she married not long after the events of 1941.
But she hadn’t seen his name get a mention yet.
The diary had been tightly bound and Lucy winced as she opened it a little further.
The spine creaked in protest, but then in the join she spotted dark, dry specks.
Carefully, she tipped them out onto a blank sheet of paper, and, as she carefully ran Mémé’s magnifying glass over them, she realised she was looking at dried purple petals.
Lucy had absorbed so much information from the memory box that she couldn’t at once alight on the significance, but she knew there was something. She looked again at Margot’s description of Theo’s cottage after the plane crash, and shivered as she read the words again.
Margot had picked a flower on her way to the ruined cottage, and had left it on his desk as a tribute, not realising he had survived. The flower had purple blooms.
The heart drawn round the date, and the remains of the dried flower, spoke to Lucy from the past. Margot and Theo had enjoyed a romance. Albeit fleeting. Lucy dreaded finding out what happened to Theo, who seemed like such a gentle, kind man.
One of the envelopes in the box contained letters in Margot’s handwriting.
They were short and lacked dates and addresses, and were only addressed to Mon cheri.
Lucy hadn’t paid much attention to them before, as she’d thought they were letters to Serge and she’d already read through a heap of those.
But now she sat down to read them properly, she realised they must’ve been written to Theo.
Margot talked about how much she missed him and hoped to see him again soon, and how she liked to listen to music on the radio and think that, wherever he was, he was listening to the same tune.
Lucy struggled with how tightly Margot had written her words, to make the most of a short supply of paper, but bit by bit she worked through the letters.
There was a reference in one sentence, which Lucy nearly missed as it seemed to be about music again, to ‘finding the meaning in the notes’. Lucy read carefully: matching up the key… tracing the dots… finding the letters…
It sounded like Margot was talking about a code.
Lucy was surprised at first, but then, she thought the book club were resisting the Germans.
It wasn’t so odd that they would be dealing with encoded messages as well.
Lucy remembered something in the memory box that hadn’t made any sense when she’d first found it.
She carefully worked through the photographs and letters until she found it, and held it up to the strong summer light streaming through the window. A sheet of tracing paper, covered in dots.
She ran downstairs holding the tracing paper, along with the letter and Theo’s handwritten lullaby for Isabelle, and headed out into the warm, sunshine-filled street. As she reached Jojo’s bar she almost fell over Galette, who had come to meet her.
Lucy paused to fuss the dog. ‘Where’s your dad, Galette? I’ve got something to show him!’
‘I was just coming to knock on your door!’ Sébastien said as he stepped out of the bar into the sunshine. ‘I’ve just finished tonight’s special and need someone to sample the vichyssoise. Galette volunteered, but… well, he likes everything!’
He looked delightfully rumpled from the kitchen, his hair a tousled mop. He had the beginnings of stubble on his chin.
‘I’d love to try it,’ Lucy replied eagerly.
Then she told him, ‘I’ve just been reading the notebook, and I finally realised something.
Look at this!’ She held the sheet of marked tracing paper up to Sébastien, who must’ve thought she’d gone mad, and then showed him the sheet music of the lullaby.
‘They used this sheet of paper to crack code hidden in music!’
Sébastien looked at the tracing paper, then at the sheet music, his eyes sparkling. ‘So go on… what does the lullaby say?’
‘Lauterborn’s a rotten old bastard, maybe?’ Lucy joked. She’d kept him up to date with everything she’d found out, but now she was thinking about Margot and Theo’s kiss, and it made her blush to look at Sébastien.
On the nearest table, she laid the tracing paper over the handwritten lullaby, and saw that the dots on the paper aligned with Theo’s musical notes. ‘Oh, Sébastien, look – it works! Although I don’t know what it says. We’d have to sit down together and figure it out.’
Sébastien glanced back into the bar, where Anouk was polishing glasses. She gave a mischievous wave.
‘So we sit down with some food and a glass of wine and wrap our heads around it,’ he suggested. ‘I’ve got an hour right now if you have?’
‘Oh, I have, yes,’ Lucy replied. ‘And I’ve got some other news to tell you as well.’
She found them a table in the cool interior of the bar and Galette sat beside her as she took her seat. She was fizzing with excitement.
There was another reason to be excited too, and he was heading her way, bringing steaming bowls to their table. ‘White wine for the book club queen,’ Anouk said, grinning as she brought two glasses over too. ‘All that’s missing here is a romantic red rose!’
‘I didn’t know you wanted a new job,’ Sébastien replied dryly, but Lucy was sure she caught the faintest hint of a blush. ‘You’ll never make it as a comedian, Anouk!’
She stuck out her tongue, then wandered back to the bar to continue preparing for the bustling evening crowd.
Lucy wasn’t sure what to say. She hadn’t wanted to acknowledge what had been simmering inside her, but somehow Anouk had seen it.
Sébastien was a very handsome man and a talented chef; the bowls of soup he’d brought to the table smelt divine.
He must’ve had a queue of women a mile long wanting to go out with him.
And besides, Lucy tried very hard to remind herself, she’d gone off men.
‘I wanted to tell you that I’ve changed my mind,’ she said. She hoped that he hadn’t set his heart on owning Les Pages d’Espoir. ‘I’m not selling the bookshop; I want to stay in Cordeval.’
‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ Sébastien murmured thoughtfully. ‘And good news for a couple of reasons.’
‘And why’s that?’ Lucy was relieved that he thought it was good news. She took a spoonful of the vichyssoise soup and paused for a moment to enjoy the flavours. ‘I hadn’t wanted to disappoint you, not if you were really looking forward to taking on the bookshop.’
He nodded. ‘Well, your gran wanted you to have it. So wherever she is, she’s happy.’ He smiled. ‘And if I was buying your shop, I wouldn’t feel right asking you out. But I’m not, so… do you fancy doing something this weekend?’
Lucy nearly dropped her spoon in surprise.
‘I’d love to.’ She was surprised by her words, but she knew it was the right reply.
She felt so happy when she was with him, and when she wasn’t she felt warmth and contentment just thinking about him.
Maybe it was too soon after Andrew, but why not?
She grinned at him and asked, ‘Does this mean that this is sort of a date too? A code-cracking first date?’
Sébastien laughed, then rapped his knuckles on the table. ‘Get to it, soldier. What does it say?’
Lucy angled the music and the paper overlaying it so they could both see it, then referred back to Margot’s letter.
There had to be some meaning in it, some message that the combination of dots and notes would reveal.
It was confusing to begin with, and she wished Theo was sitting at their table too, explaining how it worked.
He was the musician, after all; he must’ve known.
But then, finally, it clicked, and Lucy jabbed her finger at the paper.
‘It says, “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”!’ The national motto of France. She beamed at Sébastien. ‘It’s as if Theo’s spoken straight to us.’
‘Hidden in a lullaby,’ Sébastien murmured, looking down at the notes. ‘And what about our scat jazz? What does that one say?’
Lucy turned over the piece of paper. The music wasn’t as neat and tidy as Theo’s, as if it’d been written by someone who wasn’t as familiar with notes and staves.
Now that she’d worked out how to decipher the code, it didn’t take long for her to pull out a string of letters.
But she had no idea what it meant and wondered if she’d made a mistake somewhere.
‘Margot Zichrona Livracha…?’ Lucy took a sip of her wine as she ran the words through her mind. ‘I don’t know, but I feel like I should know what it means…’
Sébastien reached into his pocket and took out his phone.
Once Lucy had spelled out the words, he said, ‘It’s Hebrew.
’ Then he turned the screen round for her to see.
‘“May her memory be a blessing.” That must be a message for Margot.’ He frowned.
‘Why would someone leave a blessing in code for Margot?’
Lucy stared at the words, then met Sébastien’s gaze. She was so glad that he was as fascinated by Cordeval’s secret histories as she was; so much bound them together. ‘I wonder who wrote that? Maybe Daniel, because Margot faced all that risk to care for his baby? Did she ever see it?’
‘This story needs to be told,’ Sébastien said decisively. ‘By the woman who runs the new Resistance Book Club.’
Lucy smiled. There was something in his gaze, in those dark, twinkling eyes. And it looked very much like a spark that promised more.