Once Upon a Rose (20 page)

“You did,” his aunt said, with the calm of a woman quite sure who was right in any discussion—herself. “And I never once used the word
too
about any of you kids. Except, sometimes, about how sensitive you are.” A firm, chiding look.

Matt tried to fold his arms across his chest again, and Layla’s hand got in the way.

It threw him completely off. He couldn’t even get his glower right, all fractured, his left arm folding lamely across his chest with nothing to grip, and he finally just ran that hand across his face and through his hair instead, looking lost. But he didn’t let go of her hand.

He snuck a glance down at Layla.

You are adorable
, she thought up at him.

Color tinged his cheeks.

She brought her other hand to his big one, so that she could squeeze it between hers in its own little hug.

Because her whole body wanted to squeeze him. Her thigh muscles, her inner muscles,
everything
wanted to squeeze him as tight as she could. Maybe she should tell him that, she thought on a surge of mischief. See how the information hit him.

Weren’t you going to behave at some point?
she reminded herself.

Her ability to forget an audience was really not standing her in good stead here. She focused apologetically on Colette Delatour.

She found the old woman studying her intently, as if a strong enough look could see through to her bones. Layla was pretty sure her bones didn’t have the proper density to impress a ninety-six-year-old war hero, and her hand tightened on Matt’s for moral support. “I, uh…thank you,” she finally remembered to say. “For such an extraordinary gift.”
Why did you give it to me? I don’t know you.

“You don’t look very much like her,” Colette Delatour said quietly. “Your great-grandmother.”

“I think I mostly take after my mother.” Her mother’s hair was even more tightly curly, so her father’s genes had had some effect, but it wasn’t obvious.

“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.”

“Oh, God.” Layla cried harder.

Matt made a little rumble and pulled her closer, so that her face was pressed against his chest.

“Your grandfather and I,” Colette said to Matt, “we took a lot of risks. We killed people. We saved people. And if we survived, it wasn’t always because we were as smart and wily as we thought we were. Sometimes it was the tiny thing someone did to help us, the shepherd who let his flock spill into the path of a car full of SS who might, if they had been five minutes faster on the road, come upon us. The man who spotted a message that had fallen out of someone’s pocket and used it to roll a cigarette and smoke it while he told the police he hadn’t seen any sign of anyone. Or that tiny, tiny thing—a cyanide capsule that a mother took, abandoning her right to see her own child grow up because it was the only way she could save all those other kids whose parents weren’t going to see them grow up either.”

Layla fisted both hands into Matt’s T-shirt and sobbed.

“When you’re as old as I am,” Colette said. “You start giving a lot of thought to what parts of your life you want to leave to whom. I thought Élise’s great-grandchild deserved something from me. If she hadn’t done what she did, we wouldn’t have that valley. We wouldn’t even have lived long enough for your grandfather to have those five sons of his, of whom he’s so proud. We adopted her son and tried to raise him, but we never really managed to heal him from the war and the loss of his parents, and he ran away when he was sixteen. We tried for him, and we failed. But I think we can share a little bit of this valley with his descendants. My adoptive great-grandchild, if you will.” She inclined her head to Layla.

Under her cheek and clinging fists, Matt’s chest lifted and fell in a great sigh. His arms tightened on Layla. But he didn’t say anything.

“Besides, Matthieu, you can’t be a valley,” Colette said, with a quiet firmness, as if she’d said that the Earth was not the center of the universe. “You’ve got to be bigger than that. There are more ways of growing bigger than a valley than escaping from it. One way might be to crack it open, so that even while you’re here, it has room to let the whole world in.”

Layla lifted her head enough to check Matt’s expression. His jaw was set, his gaze locked with his great aunt’s. She peeked at Colette Delatour, warily, afraid of how much learning more of her family history might hurt.

Colette held Matt’s gaze, lifting her two hands closed together in a capsule of age-spotted wrinkles. “Kind of like, oh, a heart,” she said. “When you do this.” She spread her fingers and let her palms follow, until those tightly-clasped hands were wide open, free to move through the whole world. Then she smoothed them over her skirt and rose.

Matt stared after her for a moment before he lifted a hand to sink it into Layla’s hair. “Sorry about that,” he murmured to the top of Layla’s head. “I forgot to warn you that my aunt has no idea of her own strength.”

Colette gave them a curious, perplexed look as she stood sideways by the pot, stirring it. “She’s as soft-hearted as you are,” she told Matt, as if hearts that soft were an intriguing mystery to her.

Matt stiffened. “I’m not soft-hearted.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Colette ladled the soup into bowls. “I don’t know why I keep forgetting that.” She carried the bowls to the table to set before them. “Although I’m not sure why you worry about it so much. I thought I was just telling you how soft hearts can be great strength.”

Matt scraped mortar over the crack in the wall, that steady, reassuring scent of cement and earth and gravel mixing with the rosemary that brushed his arms and the lemon thyme he tried to crush as little as possible under his feet while he worked.

At the weatherworn picnic table—he needed to sand that table down and re-stain it—the two women sat over more photo albums from when Tante Colette was young, Layla touching a finger to a page here and there, asking questions. Her exuberantly curly head brushed Tante Colette’s shoulder as she bent, her expression giving every evidence of fascination in an old woman’s stories.

It twisted his stomach up, how nice she was. This strange, giddy, frantic feeling, like that time he was in the school play when he was nine. He’d been so excited to play the big, bad monster instead of the idiot prince—he
had
, he really had, it was a much funner role—and then he’d looked out from the wings to find what seemed like thousands of faces staring and Raoul and Lucien had had to grab his arms and shove him to get him to go on.

No one could force him to do anything these days—he was too big. He’d done it on purpose, gotten too big to be pushed.

He scooped up more mortar and layered it over the crack. Layla laughed. Either she was genuinely fascinated by these old tales of a time that had reshaped a nation and a world, or she was very patient, because they’d been looking at photos for an hour.

As he glanced across at them, Layla looked up from the album, her eyes sparkling and locking with his.

Oh. The long, swooshing slide of his stomach.

He focused on fixing the wall.

Layla laughed again, that husky, happy sound, and his whole body tightened, yearning. Not as if his cousins were shoving him and his panicked stomach out on stage. As if all those beautiful, bright lights out there had reached a string into his middle and were pulling him toward them.

As if he wasn’t supposed to leap out growling and roaring to scare the princess, he was supposed to dance out on stage like the sucker of a classmate who had had to play the idiot prince. Poor Hugo had never lived that down. Much better to be the roaring beast in this world than to try to be the prince.

Really.

It was.

Layla clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes dancing with delight as she looked at him.

Hey.

Wait a damn minute.

He surged to his feet. “What are you looking at now?”

Layla giggled. Tante Colette smiled.

“Hey!” He strode forward.
Merde
, he recognized that album. “Tata! Did you get out—Tata!
Not the alien photo.
”

Layla grinned at him. “I like the Superman briefs.”

“Tata!” Damn it. He tried to cover his nearly naked six-year-old self with a thumb. Painted entirely red, hair tousled in sloppy, paint-streaked curls around his face, he beamed in his Superman briefs there in the middle of his similarly naked cousins, Raoul painted green, Damien blue, Lucien yellow, Tristan—as the youngest and most put-upon at age four—purple. They’d been playing at alien invasion, but all of them had wanted to be the aliens so they’d tried to invade their parents’ lazy Sunday afternoon around the table together. All so young and so innocent and so easily abused by their elders that they’d actually posed proudly for the photo, too, and now had to pay for it for all eternity. “
Tante Colette.
”

Damn it, he could never trust his family for a second.