It was 1:15 a.m. The clock on the mantel ticked, the only sound in the room other than the occasional pop and rustle in the fireplace.

Michel and Charlotte sat in his father’s end of the room in the chairs by the fireplace, watching the glow of slumbering embers. Charlotte’s husband, Gerard, paced along the bookshelves, hands behind his back.

“You should go,” Michel said, surprised at the sound of his voice. He had fallen into some stupor.

“We will not leave you, Monsieur Rousseau,” Charlotte said.

“Clemmie is in trouble, not me. Braun took mine away. I think he is a good man, Charlotte. Hard to tell, with Germans.”

“I know he is.”

Michel looked over and saw her for the first time since she had arrived more than an hour ago. She had turned on the lights. She put a coat about his shoulders. She made coffee. Gerard started a fire.

His eyes wandered the room. Father sat in that chair. François cleared out the cabinet for a hiding place. Wilkie sent and received transmissions. Rafael received orders. He and Braun played whatever game they played, and Charlotte took dictation, did the payroll, ran errands—and coordinated a Resistance cell called Sept. Seven. “It is the number of times a righteous man falls, and rises again,” she had told him an hour ago.

Sept specialized in information, the printing and distributing of underground newspapers. The name of her newspaper, printed by Gerard on an old printing press in the boiler room of a church, was Les Sept Fois. The Seven Times. Michel had read it often, never knowing its anonymous pen was that of his secretary.

During the early days of the Occupation, the first efforts of those who felt compelled to do something generally focused on providing the French public with truthful, accurate information on what was going on with the Allies and the Axis. The information connected them and gave hope. Speeches from de Gaulle, unheard at the beginning of the war by those who had had no access to the BBC—and that was most of the public—were printed in its pages. Speeches from Churchill, from Roosevelt; words of hope from Catholic priests and Anglican ministers; advice columns on how to resist without looking like you were resisting; practical information on how to use fuel more efficiently; recipes to make food stretch or taste better—it was all in Les Sept Fois, and had been for years.

“I should have known,” Michel now said.

Charlotte gave a small, acknowledging lift of her brow. Her lined face, sliding past middle age and heading to elderly, was weary. Yet a satisfied sparkle shone in the deep brown eyes.

“Some things sounded familiar,” Michel mused.

“Some came straight from your mouth.”

“The idea to make coal balls out of coal dust and newspaper . . .”

“That was you.”

“It was actually Marie, François’s wife. And you quoted a woman as saying, ‘Defeat we can accept; collaboration, never.’ It surprised me. I was encouraged to see others felt the same as I.”

“I liked it coming out of a woman’s mouth.”

“What did you do with the book?”

“I was going to burn it,” she admitted. “But then I thought, if things go very badly, then someday, years from now, people need to know. They need to find it in an attic, read what your father wrote in the margins. Have some idea where the madness began.”

“Did it begin with Hitler?” Michel wondered.

“Perhaps not. His is not a unique evil. Just a very old one.”

The remarkable thing about Charlotte was that she was, in fact, unremarkable. The diminutive woman was plain of face and quiet in manner. She was even a bit boring. She used to be plump in pre-Occupation years, and she wore her new thinness with a forbearance of spirit that Michel suspected she rather enjoyed. Some undertook to endure the indignities and inconveniences of the Occupation with grim relish, and Charlotte was one of these. Yet nothing in her stoic manner so much as hinted at the unlawful events that lay beneath, much less the acumen that flowed from her unlawful pen.

She noticed a tiny spot of some offense on her blouse, brushed at it, examined the results, and glanced at the clock on the mantel.

“Charlotte, please,” Michel protested. “Go home. Get some rest. Gerard, take your wife home.”

“You think she listens to me?” Gerard grunted.

“I wonder how it went with Rafael,” Charlotte mused.

Charlotte’s role was still quite new to him. “You don’t even call him André. I told him not to go.”

“If I were the pilot, I would have wanted to know.”

“Me, too,” Gerard said.

Michel shook his head. “He would have been happier. It would have been mercy.”

Rafael was at the office when Michel had returned from sending Tom away to Bénouville. The boy had learned about Clemmie in the worst way possible: he had been there.

The B-17 had a catastrophic landing, no parachutes, no survivors, and in fact had killed an unknown number of civilians when it plowed into a farmhouse outside Houlgate. After being hit inland, the pilot had come about and seemed to have made a valiant effort to ditch into the sea. Rafael came to the site as neighbors sifted through the smoldering wreckage for survivors. There was nothing to be done, so he decided to visit Clemmie on his way back to Caen.

For the first time, the kitchen curtain was drawn over half of the window. Had it been fully drawn, it would have been safe to go in. Rafael nearly did not check. When he did, incomprehension froze his feet. There could not be trouble with Clemmie. Anyone but Clemmie. It was impossible.

He ducked across the road into a hedgerow and waited for hours, watching the home. Just when he was ready to come out, armed with a good tongue-lashing for Clemmie’s lapse in protocol, he caught a glimpse of a German soldier through the front window. There was no lapse. Clemmie was taken.

It was so unthinkable, he could not remember how he made it back to Caen, only that, by the time he did, word had already reached Wilkie that Clemmie and the three Jews had been arrested.

The telephone jangled, and all three jumped.

Michel rose and hurried to his desk. “Hello.”

“Rousseau?” It was Braun. “You are still there.”

“I am here.”

There was a pause. Michel gripped the receiver.

“I am afraid I have bad news. The grandmother is dead.” He added quickly, “She died of a heart attack. Or perhaps a stroke. Natural causes, Rousseau.”

The telephone nearly slipped from his hand.

So goes a rose of France.

The wind came and took her away, bore her to a place where her beauty could be unveiled. Yet how sorely they needed her beauty here.

“Rousseau?”

Michel found his voice. “You are sure she is dead?” He was vaguely aware of a stifled exclamation from Charlotte, Gerard hurrying to her side.

“I am just from the hospital. I saw her myself. She was to be transferred to Paris in the morning. Before they finished the paperwork, she had a heart attack.”

She had not suffered as Jasmine had. Yet she was dead.

Rafael would take it very hard.

“Any news of the other three?” Michel asked.

Silence. Then Braun said in cold anger, “Is it not enough that I saw to the old woman? Is it not enough for you?” A moment passed. He hung up.

Michel replaced the receiver and said softly, “Oh, Tom.”

When the blond behemoth appeared at her door, Madame Bouvier believed her time on earth was up. Was this how the Christians in the Colosseum felt after living in the dark in the catacombs, hunted down, seized, thrown for sport to gladiators and lions? Relief that it was finally over? Exhilaration that they would soon be in heaven? Fear of the pain of getting there?

“I must consult with Father Chaillet,” she had said crazily.

Then she saw the face of the comparably tiny Frenchman behind the behemoth. She knew that face. It was he who, on that terrible day, had called out the wrongs done upon the young woman thrown into the street. It was he who took tender care of Monsieur Rousseau.

“Kirsch,” the behemoth said breathlessly. “Lieutenant Kirsch.”

“Please let us in, madame,” the Frenchman said, with a backward glance.

That was an hour ago.

Gisèlle Bouvier spoke little English, and because she hated to do something unless she did it admirably, she chose not to speak it at all. She ignored the handsome young pilot and kept her attention on Rafael. He explained the situation, and a terrible one it was. Somehow she was not surprised Brigitte was at the heart of it.

The pilot sat at a bench in the kitchen, head in hands. He pulled from his melancholic stupor to rattle something in English, then sank into it once more. Gisèlle looked at Rafael.

“He is worried about Brigitte. He does not know what they are doing to her.”

“Nonsense. She can think on her feet. Tell him her reputation is not all mirrors on the ceiling.” At Rafael’s wondering look, she said crisply, “I stayed at a brothel in Paris last year. They hid me for two days. They had mirrors. Brigitte will be fine; it’s him I’m worried about. Look at him.” She shook her head in grave respect of Greenland’s now sadly defunct plan. This man was cut from the fabric of Germany like Hitler never was. “Hide him under a bushel, no . . .”

“But he needs a place to hide until we hear from the BBC.”

“He has it, God help me; but do you suppose, with the Gestapo next door, that I can use a radio at my leisure? A daft mother can answer many things, but it cannot cover the sound of a radio.”

“We will listen. We will bring word as soon as we hear anything.” Then Rafael said, “We are grateful, madame.”

The pilot said something. Wearily, Rafael nodded and, at Gisèlle’s look, said, “He is very worried about Clemmie. The old woman who hid him in Cabourg. Her home was raided. She was arrested.”

“That is too bad,” Gisèlle said gently. “I am sorry.”

The pilot rose and began to walk the kitchen floor. He said something, to which Rafael responded sharply.

“Gentlemen, you will have to keep quiet. My crazy mother has not yet begun to speak English in a man’s voice.”

The pilot seemed to pick it up, quieted. He spoke urgently to Rafael, who argued strongly back. The pilot declared something quite vehemently; Rafael flung his arms in an angry gesture, then, face dark, fumbled in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. He offered one to Gisèlle, who took one only because they were Lucky Strikes. While they sat at the table and smoked, the pilot continued his restless prowl of the kitchen, back and forth, back and forth.

“He wants to go tonight and break her out,” Rafael muttered. “He says he can do it with his rank.”

“Perhaps he can.”

“You do not understand. He looks the part, but cannot play it. He would be arrested.” He chuckled bitterly. “That is why we are here. He gave himself away. It was not his fault. I . . . We did not have enough time to train him. He would have done well, I think. He is angry because I will not guide him to Cabourg.”

After a moment, Gisèlle said, “Tell him I can at least inquire about Brigitte. Word has spread I have undertaken to convert her.” She glanced ruefully at her wrapped foot propped on a chair. “Tomorrow I will go to the brothel with my Bible, and it will not be questioned.”

Rafael passed it on to the pilot, who nodded gratefully, looked directly at Gisèlle, and said, “Merci.” But he resumed his restless tour.

“What can be done about this Clemmie?” she asked, watching the unhappy man.

Rafael pulled on his cigarette, jerked his shoulder. “I lied and told him we would figure something out.” He spoke rapidly, she knew, so that if the pilot did have any French, he would not pick it up. “But it’s over for her. She will be sent to Paris. The Jews will be sent to Germany.”

“Jews?”

“She hid three. They were taken.”

Three. It had to be three. “Was it a mother and two children?” Gisèlle asked faintly.

Rafael glanced at her, shook his head.

Perhaps God forgot confessed sins, as Father Chaillet suggested; Gisèlle Bouvier had a better memory than God. She had no right to forget.

It was 1942, July. Paris, the Vélodrome d’Hiver—the bicycle racetrack and stadium. A year earlier, Gisèlle had turned in her Jewish housekeeper and the housekeeper’s two children. They were sent to Paris, and then, Gisèlle was to learn, they were sent to the Vélodrome in the Jewish roundup.

Hannah had brown corkscrew ringlets. Mother had made a wide satin bow for her hair. She loved Mother, and Mother loved her. She was three years old.

“This cannot be my Hannah,” Mother had said of the photograph on the front page of the underground newspaper Les Sept Fois.

But it was.

She stood in a group of children behind a chain-link fence. She was not the smallest child—no, little Hannah was holding a baby, a real baby. Who the baby was, Gisèlle did not know. Where Hannah’s older sister was, Gisèlle did not know. The caption read, “Jewish children taken from their parents.”

Mother knew her by the bow. Gisèlle knew her, and every child in the photograph, by the monstrous guilt.

For a time, Gisèlle Bouvier went a little crazy.

To this day, she could not remember how she got to Lyon, seven hundred kilometers away, in Vichy territory, the Unoccupied Zone.

“Formidable!” Mother sang appreciatively of the young Allied pilot, arms outstretched as if to conduct a song.

She shuffled into the kitchen, slippers flapping, dressing gown quite open with no clothing beneath. Not a stitch.

“Rafael, my foot hurts. Could you . . . ?” Gisèlle nodded at Mother.

Rafael, mouth sagging in horror—and who would not be horrified, Gisèlle thought; please, God, take me before I am a walking prune—roused himself and went to the old woman. He put his cigarette in his mouth and, holding himself back as far as he could, awkwardly pulled Mother’s robe together. He found the sash and tied it.

Mother had rapt attention only for the pilot. After waiting for Rafael to finish the trussing, she went straight for him. Gisèlle hid a smile.

Age-filmed eyes dancing, the tiny old woman stopped in front of the pilot, who had stopped, too. She gazed with her head far back, as when Gisèlle had taken her to the Eiffel Tower. She was as delighted now as she was then. She clasped soft and wrinkled hands to her cheeks, then beckoned the pilot down.

He bent low, and Gisèlle saw the deep anxiety in his face, fear like a fog within. At the old lady’s admiration, he mustered a smile and began to withdraw. But Mother wasn’t finished, as Gisèlle knew she was not. She took his cheeks in the soft, wrinkled hands, and declared in her high trill, “Do not be distressed, my dear! So goes a rose of France, to the bouquet from which she came!” Beaming, she patted the cheeks, and the pilot withdrew to his height. “This one is a keeper, Gisèlle. I’ll have Eloise set another place for tea.”

“Tell him she talks nonsense,” Gisèlle said, pleased that the pilot’s face was a trifle less worried.

Rafael spoke to the pilot in English, then asked, “Who is Eloise?”

“She was our housekeeper. Mother thinks every ‘guest’ is a potential beau.”

“You let this one go, and you are crazy,” Mother declared.

“I won’t, Mother,” Gisèlle reassured.

“You will have huge babies,” Mother said thoughtfully. “I worry about your milk.”

“Don’t translate that,” Gisèlle said with a stiff smile.

“Don’t worry,” Rafael muttered.