Once Upon a Rose(58)

“There’s maybe something,” Madame Delatour said. “Around the eyes and the jawline.”

“You must have known her very well?”

“She died for me,” the old woman said simply, and Layla gave a gasp of shock, her fingers tightening hard on Matt’s. “Not just for me, but for all of us. To keep what we were doing secret. You don’t forget a woman like that.”

Tears stung Layla’s eyes suddenly. She didn’t even know what her great-grandmother looked like. And yet Colette Delatour’s words shook her heart.

“Hey.” Matt loosed her hand to lay his arm across her shoulders, a heavy, reassuring warmth. “You okay?”

Layla nodded, leaning into him as she blinked, trying not to act ridiculous. “My great-grandmother died?” Well, obviously she knew that her great-grandmother had died at some point. But…“For somebody? Like…on purpose?”

“Come,” Colette Delatour said quietly. “Let me show you a picture of her.”



Matthieu sat warm and quiet by Layla’s side in the kitchen while Colette Delatour showed her the photos. Red pots hung on the walls, brightening the dark wood. A handful of fresh herbs lay on a cutting board on the counter. Colette stood briefly to toss them into a simmering pot, releasing the scents of thyme and rosemary into the air. Taking a copper teakettle off the stove, she poured them both a tea rich with mint. Tea seemed an odd drink for someone as big and grumpily masculine as Matt, but he took his without comment, his hands curling around the cup like a solace.

“Here she is.” An old hand pressed an age-browned page open and turned it to Layla. Layla stared at the black and white photo of a woman in a slim skirt, her hair twisted at the nape of her neck, smiling for the camera. “That was taken just a few months before Pétain and his like split our country in two and pretended the southern part was free, when he was really a German puppet.”

Layla touched the edge of the photo carefully. “How did she die?”

“She was part of our cell.”

“The Resistance,” Matt murmured to clarify. “They used to ferry kids across the Alps into Switzerland. Among other things.”

“But she was always afraid she might not be able to handle the pain if she got caught, so she had cyanide ready. When the SS stormed her house, she managed to take it, so they wouldn’t be able to make her reveal the rest of us.”

The story was told so simply, and Layla could only stare at its teller with her mouth open in shock. Sometimes her grandparents on her mother’s side, who had left Beirut when her mother was a child to escape the war, would mention little, casual things about ducking through streets to avoid snipers, about bombs falling on a house across the street from theirs. They would even laugh over the memory of the whole wedding party dashing madly through the open to get to the church for their wedding, then dashing madly back post ceremony and dancing all night with the music turned up loud while bombs fell. Little revelations of a world nothing like any Layla had ever known.

This was like that. Worse, even. Élise Dubois had taken cyanide and died in order to protect herself from torture and her friends from what she might reveal.

That meant she’d had the cyanide ready, in full knowledge that her actions and choices might some day force her to use it. And yet she’d still taken those actions.

Layla’s eyes filled, her nose starting to sting, as she stared at the photo of the woman who was her great-grandmother. Tears trembled past her lashes, and she pressed her face into her hands suddenly as she started to cry.

A big, warm arm wrapped around her and pulled her in close, in silence.

“Élise was a schoolteacher,” Colette Delatour said. “The first in her family. Her father was a perfume factory worker and her mother picked flowers for us, so it was a big deal at the time for her to have become a teacher. Her husband was one of those who died in the first onslaught, before the surrender, but she had her own child, who was only eight. And there was one child in her class she knew hadn’t really left Paris to stay with her grandparents. She knew the child was really a Jewish girl in hiding. So when the Milice started sniffing around and challenging the girl’s identity papers, Élise had to do something. She couldn’t stand by, not knowing the girl. One of her own son’s little friends. That’s how Élise first got involved, and it grew from there. Your grandfather and I, we always thought in big, dramatic terms—to save all the kids, to drive the Germans out of the valley, to drive them out of France. But a lot of people helped the individual person. They didn’t believe in their ability to change their whole world, the way Jacky and I did, so mostly they wanted to hunker down and ride out the war, and hope someone else would do something about it. They didn’t believe in themselves, in their ability to do big things, but they couldn’t turn away from a child who needed help. It was hard for Jacky and me to understand people like that at first—people who could feel so small against such a great evil that they could only do tiny things. But tiny things grow and grow. Most people don’t set out to save the world, they just can’t stand to see one child’s tears. Élise was like that. And after she helped one, she had to help all the others.”