La Fleur never appeared that night, leaving my father empty-handed. A few months later, however, the wives of Nazi officers began appearing in public with beautiful diamond and ruby jewelry leaving many to speculate that my father had lied and had profited from the treasure meant for the Resistance.
He was questioned relentlessly and his reputation permanently damaged, yet he consistently maintained his innocence. For all these years he has been dogged by not only La Fleur’s betrayal, but how he himself was forced into the position of being hailed a traitor and a thief. Unbeknownst to me, he has unsuccessfully spent his entire life attempting to clear his name and find the elusive La Fleur. I’m afraid my father is near the end of his life, and it is his last wish that I might be able to succeed where he has failed.
I have sent many inquiries to various government offices both here in the States and in France for more information and have hit a brick wall, as many records from the war are still confidential. However, after doing quite a bit of research as well as trying to piece together my father’s story, I came to understand that at least part of the answer might well be with your husband’s effects, or even in any of the stories he might have shared with you of his war years.
I apologize if this letter is unwelcome during this time of your grief, but a part of me hopes that you are not only able to assist me, but also willing to revisit some of your husband’s past.
I have arranged to be assigned to my firm’s Paris office for a brief period of time starting April 20th. I understand that this is short notice and you most likely have a very busy life and would be unable to make the trip across the Channel. Yet I feel compelled to at least ask—very brazen and American of me, I know. But I believe that being in Paris while searching for La Fleur is what I must do, and it is my strongest wish that you might be able to join me in this quest. My father never met you, but he was certain that the woman Kit Langford married had to be a force to be reckoned with. I’m not a betting man, but I’d like to wager that he was right.
I will be staying at the Ritz and you may address any correspondence there as they have instructions to forward to my office if a letter arrives prior to my own arrival. I look forward to hearing from you or, even better, meeting you in Paris.
Yours truly,
Andrew Bowdoin, Esq.
My hands shook when I read the letter again, and then a third time. Then, carefully, I refolded the letter and returned it to its torn envelope. Ignoring the rest of the post scattered on the steps, I climbed the remaining stairs and headed down the long hallway to the door at the end, each step more purposeful than the last, my anger at the enigmatic woman I had been forced to share my husband with for almost twenty years growing with each step. The grandest traitor of them all.
I yanked open the door to the attic steps, ignoring the puff of dust that blew in my face and made me sneeze, the stale, icy air of the unused space making my teeth chatter. I made my way to the trunk in the corner, a place I hadn’t returned to since I’d thought I’d buried the memory of La Fleur. A ticking bomb, indeed.
With another sneeze, I knelt down in front of the trunk, lifted the latch, and opened the lid. I pulled out a linen-bound book, allowing it to rest in my hands while I sat back on the floor, ignoring the coating of dust. Smoothing my hand over the title, I read it in the murky light. The Scarlet Pimpernel. It was the one thing Kit had managed to keep in the camp, hidden again and again to prevent it from being confiscated. Kit had once confessed that it had been his token of survival, his lucky card. When he’d recovered enough, he’d asked me to throw it away as it was a part of his past. And then he’d asked me to marry him.
I opened the front cover, reading the words stamped inside. Le Mouton Noir, Rue Volney, Paris. I began flipping through the pages until the book opened up to a folded piece of paper, another letter, this one sent to Kit a year after his return. I didn’t need to read it to know what it said. I’d read the French words often enough that they were emblazoned on my brain.
My Darling Kit,
Oh, how I have missed you. I have barely existed these past years after we last said goodbye, waiting for news of you, to know if you survived. It has been so long since I’ve seen your face, but I remember it as well as my own. I see it every night when I fall asleep, and it’s as if you are next to me again, in Paris, where we found love amid so much destruction. When you told me that swans mate for life.
Remember the promise that we made to each other? That if we are both alive we would meet at the Ritz. So, darling, meet me at the Ritz this Christmas. I will wait for you until New Year’s and if you don’t come, I will know that you have a new life and that I am no longer a part of it. I will not write again. My only hope is that you remember me and the short time we had together and know that I will always love you. Always. La Fleur
My anger exploded inside of me, fueled by guilt and betrayal and grief. By the irrefutable fact that I’d never been my husband’s first choice. Shoving the letter back into the book, I slammed down the trunk’s lid before hurrying out of the attic, The Scarlet Pimpernel clutched tightly to my chest.
I marched down to Kit’s study and pulled out a pen and paper. Before I could stop myself, I wrote a letter to Mr. Andrew Bowdoin, informing him that I would book a room at the Ritz and would like to meet with him after my arrival on the twentieth. I signed it Mrs. Barbara Langford and sealed it into an envelope.
As I placed the letter on the hall table to go out with the outgoing post, I had a fleeting worry as to what Mrs. Finch might think, but then quickly brushed the thought aside. I was weary of wrestling with ghosts. It was time to lay this one to rest.
Chapter Two
Aurélie
The Hôtel Ritz
Paris, France
September 1914
“Darling, do try to rest. You’re making me dizzy with your pacing. Wearing a track in my carpet won’t drive the Germans away, you know.”
“Neither will drinking champagne,” muttered Aurélie, but her mother didn’t hear her.
Her mother never heard her.
Even now, with the Germans a mere thirty kilometers from Paris, with trains running to the provinces to evacuate the fearful, with the government in exile in Bordeaux, her mother refused to allow anything to interfere with her precious salon. The treasures of the Louvre might be hastily packed in crates and shipped to Toulouse, that dreary Monsieur Proust might have taken his complaints and his madeleines and decamped to the seaside pleasures of Cabourg (and good riddance, thought Aurélie), but in the Suite Royale at the Ritz, the famed Boldini portrait of the Comtesse de Courcelles still hung above the mantel, the cunning little statuette by Rodin brooded on its stand near the fireplace, and the remains of her mother’s entourage continued to admire the countess’s elegant toilette, laugh at her witticisms, and eat her iced cakes.
Trust her mother not to allow a little thing like an invasion to discommode her.
When bombs had fallen from a German monoplane the week before, all her mother had said was, “I do hope they don’t blow out the windows. I rather like my view.”
The bon dit had already made the rounds of Paris, and Madame la Comtesse de Courcelles was being held up in the international press as an example of French fortitude, which Aurélie thought was rather rich given that her mother was American, an heiress who had married a French count and had never gone home. Whatever the early days of her parents’ marriage had been, Aurélie had no idea; all she knew was that by the time she was four her father had taken up permanent residence at the family seat in Picardy, staying at the Jockey Club if business necessitated that he spend the night in town, while her mother, abandoning the Courcelles hôtel particulier in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, had established herself in the second most opulent suite at the Ritz, surrounding herself with artists, poets, and would-be wits, American expatriates, British aesthetes, and German philosophers. In short, the riffraff of Europe. Her mother, Aurélie thought in annoyance, was an American’s idea of a Frenchwoman, impeccably turned out, always ready with a quip, urban to the bone, and about as French as California wine.