Chapter 59
FIFTY-NINE
LUCY
Lucy’s hands trembled as she unwrapped the book with painstaking care. She could feel everyone’s gaze on her as the old, yellowed newspaper crinkled, revealing a copy of The Three Musketeers.
The cover was plain, just text without any pictures. It was like the books Lucy had found in the storeroom that had been published during the war. She opened the cover and saw an inscription inside it for Isabelle: From Mummy and Daddy.
Lucy gasped as a surge of emotion went through her. ‘This is the book that Margot found inside Isabelle’s basket!’ When she turned the page, she found a loose sheet of paper that’d been slipped inside. It wasn’t as yellowed as the book, and Lucy carefully opened it.
She recognised Mémé’s handwriting at once, and, wondering why her grandmother had left the note inside the book, she read it out loud.
In memory of my precious mother, who left this book to me. And when we meet one day in heaven, we can read this story together. All my love, Arielle.
Lucy blinked back tears. She glanced at her father, who had heard every word. Just a small thing, a book that had been wrapped in newspaper and hidden under a counter, and that changed everything.
‘Dad… did you know?’ Lucy asked him with difficulty as she tried to find the right words. ‘Did you ever suspect that Margot and Emil weren’t Mémé’s parents?’
Philip shook his head. ‘No,’ he said softly. ‘All I knew is that they loved her. They loved us all.’
Lucy went over to her father and put her arms round him, holding him tight. ‘Oh, Dad…’ she murmured.
‘They were such good people,’ he whispered to her.
Lucy embraced her father for several moments, as their world shifted and readjusted around them. When she released him, Diana took over, comforting Philip as he continued to absorb what had just been revealed.
The light slanting in through the windows seemed to be coming in at a different angle.
Everything looked changed to Lucy, but was somehow still the same.
‘So that’s the secret.’ Lucy’s voice was hushed with amazement.
She turned to Beatrice and Sébastien. ‘Arielle was Isabelle. Daniel and Esther were really my great-grandparents… and we had no idea.’
Beatrice nodded gently. ‘And they adored her as their own. She knew where she came from, but she loved Margot and Emil so much.’ She blinked back unspilled tears. ‘She was blessed twice over.’
‘The wedding rings that Mémé always wore round her neck; they’d belonged to Daniel and Esther,’ Lucy said. She took their wedding photo out of the hatbox and looked at it anew. ‘They’re not just two people in an old photo any more. I feel connected to them.’
Sébastian closed his hand over Lucy’s and gave it a gentle squeeze.
Lucy returned the pressure of his touch.
She looked over at the wooden dresser, where Mémé’s photos still stood.
Beside a photo of Lucy as a toddler with Mémé and Papi at the foot of Cordeval’s lighthouse, there was a photograph of a woman with a tiny baby, standing in front of a background of summer trees.
‘I remember asking Mémé who was in that photo,’ she went on.
‘She said, “Oh, that’s me when I was only a few months old, with my aunt.” But look at Esther in the wedding photo, and the “aunt”: that’s baby Arielle in Esther’s arms. That photo’s always just been there…
I never had any idea just how precious it is. ’
Something else occurred to Lucy. Some of Margot’s scraps of paper that had served as a record of events she remembered in France had writing in English on the back.
She asked Beatrice if Margot had gone to England, and Beatrice returned to her memories, telling them what had happened after the book-burning.
Everyone sheltering in the vaults under the town hall, the rendezvous on the beach, Lauterborn’s death and, finally, the fact that Margot had escaped to England with the injured Theo and her friends’ baby.
And now, that letter A in Margot’s diary made sense; Lucy realised it marked both the day they had fled to England – Angleterre – and the day that Isabelle became Arielle.
Beatrice’s photograph albums told her more and she talked her through the sepia prints of Cordeval before the war.
Margot’s parents, Daniel’s and Esther’s.
Lucy recognised them as versions of pictures she’d found in the hatbox.
And then there were later photos – Beatrice up a ladder in the bookshop, Joséphine behind the till, the pair of them outside the shop.
There were a couple of extraordinary photos that at first looked indistinct and blurry, until Lucy looked again and realised she was looking at women in a darkened room lit by candles: it was the Resistance Book Club.
And starting from the 1940s, among photos of Beatrice’s family, there were pictures of Arielle and her brother, and then their own children and grandchildren.
‘When I read about Esther’s death, it really got to me,’ Lucy admitted. ‘It reminded me of losing my mum. And now I think about it, I wonder if that’s partly why Mémé left me the shop, because she’d lost her mum too. We were linked.’
‘You have an extra branch on your family tree,’ Beatrice said gently. ‘A remarkable one.’
‘Exactly!’ Lucy said. ‘I don’t feel a sense of loss knowing that Margot and Emil weren’t my great-grandparents.
They still are, really, because they raised Mémé.
I even met them when I was a baby. And now I’ve got resistance fighters in my family tree…
it’s incredible! And it even makes sense of the dates.
My knowledge of my family tree is a bit woolly, to be honest. I’d thought that Mémé was born in 1941, but, as I’d been putting the facts together, I had a feeling I must’ve been wrong and she’d been born in 1942 instead.
But she really had been born in 1941, just to different parents.
And then Margot must’ve met Emil in England, and Theo… ’
Poor, brave man. Shot on the beach by his brother. She supposed he must’ve died on that crossing over to England.
‘Margot never hid from Arielle who she was,’ Beatrice said softly, from where she was sitting beside Lucy.
At her side, Sébastien took his grandmother’s hand.
‘Nor what her faith was. The parents she’d lost…
the faith she’d been born into, that was as precious to Arielle as a jewel.
But so was the life she had. She was the most wonderful woman, Lucy.
She’s resting up in the churchyard, safe between Margot and Esther. Where she should be.’
Lucy could feel her tears rising again. She didn’t fight them back. She wondered if her father had ever suspected, though; perhaps it would make sense of memories and impressions of Cordeval that he’d carried with him through the world.
‘She always had that candelabra on the windowsill at Christmas,’ Lucy recalled.
‘I just thought it was a French thing, until my Jewish friend at school told me about the menorah they use at Hanukkah. I wondered then if someone in Mémé’s family had been Jewish, but I thought it might bring back memories of the war and everything, so I never asked.
All along, she’d been celebrating her parents’ faith.
’ Then she thought of Sébastien’s cottage and the plaque in Hebrew that he’d hung on the wall.
She turned to smile at him. ‘And that’s why she gave you the Hebrew blessing! ’
Beatrice nodded. ‘I miss her every day,’ she said. ‘I was blessed to know her.’
They headed up to the cemetery, where Lucy had been earlier that day to lay flowers on the grave that Mémé shared with Papi. Philip’s arm was looped through Diana’s and he was silent, lost in his thoughts. The family he had known wasn’t quite as he’d understood it.
‘What happened to Daniel, then?’ Lucy asked tentatively as they walked through the village.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, especially now that she knew he was her great-grandfather, her own flesh and blood.
She didn’t want to hear that he’d been captured and tortured by the Gestapo or the SS.
And she still didn’t know what’d happened to Theo.
‘Just like Esther, Daniel was a hero,’ said Beatrice.
‘He smuggled people out from under their noses, frustrated those bastards at every turn. He was wounded on D-Day.’ Sébastien twined his fingers with Lucy’s in a silent gesture of support.
‘And his friends brought him home to Cordeval. Arielle came on the radio that night and her father read her one of my storybooks. He died peacefully that same night. A free man.’
Lucy couldn’t reply at first and squeezed Sébastien’s fingers with her own.
She was taken over by tears again and the sunlight made the drops sparkle in her lashes.
She was so proud of Daniel, and so astonished that he’d dodged the Germans for so long.
She wished so much that he’d been spared – he could’ve raised his daughter and returned to the cottage on the cliff where he’d lived with Esther.
But she knew, deep down, that it was a miracle that he’d survived as long as he had.
And thank goodness that at least little Arielle had spoken to her father.
She must’ve been old enough then to remember that last bedtime story, and she wondered if that was why Mémé had delighted in telling children stories herself.
Each time she’d sat in the story-chair in her bookshop, with all those little faces looking up at her, had she thought of her father?
‘I’m glad he died at peace,’ she said. ‘What a brave man.’
They’d reached the cemetery, and wound their way through the graves. Lucy paused by her grandparents’ grave and said, ‘Mémé, I know now. You must be pleased to be with Papi again… and Margot and Emil… and…’
She turned and read the inscription on the headstone next to her grandparents’ grave.
She’d been so focused on the resting places of her grandparents, and Margot and Emil, earlier that she hadn’t noticed who lay on the other side.
Her father’s surprise arrival meant she hadn’t thought to look at any of the other memorials.
But there they were: Esther and Daniel. Pebbles had been left on their grave by visitors to the dead, following the Jewish tradition of leaving stones instead of flowers. Lucy wiped away her tears and crouched down, resting her hand on the marble that was cool despite the heat from the summer sun.
‘I won’t let you be forgotten,’ she told them.
‘I won’t. You have no idea how proud I am to be able to say that I’m your great-granddaughter.
I’m so sorry you didn’t get to see Arielle grow up, but then I think maybe you watched over her always.
And if you’re watching over me as well… here I am, back where I belong, in Cordeval.
And I’ll tell your story so you’ll never be forgotten. ’
She was silent for a while, absorbing everything she’d found out.
Although her father was still quiet, when she caught his glance, the expression on his face spoke volumes.
Pride and grief, and the surprise at finding himself in a different world that was somehow still the same, were all written there.
And yet there was one piece of the puzzle that hadn’t yet slotted into place.
Lucy got to her feet and went to stand at the foot of Margot and Emil’s grave.
‘I know it sounds silly, but, while I’ve been working through the memory box, I’ve become so fond of Theo,’ she said.
She looked from Sébastien’s face to Beatrice’s.
‘His story is so heartbreaking – losing his wife and his daughter like that. And he was so caring with Isa— I mean, Mémé. He got a second chance with Margot – but Margot married Emil instead. I wonder if there’s a way to find out what happened to him? ’