She sat an hour as Carlingue staff members, carrying papers, appearing busy, and looking harassed, came and went by her chair, paying her no mind. They should look worried, Bridgette thought. This morning, June 9, Madame Boucher reported that the Allies had gained the beachhead at Normandy. The couturier speculated that they would be in Paris in two months’ time. Finally a door opened to the office across from the corridor, and out walked a captain considerably older than the others of his rank. He looked like someone’s grandfather, bent, tired, and overworked. Frowning over a report, distractedly, without a glance at her, he ordered the hall guard to unshackle her hands. Released, the guard pushed her forward to follow the captain into his office. The door plate read CAPITAINE AXEL GUERIN CHARGE D’AFFAIRES. “Sit down,” the captain said vaguely, as if she were the least important item on his overflowing agenda.

Bridgette prayed that she read his disinterest correctly and that his grandfatherly manner suggested sympathy for a young girl brought in on a trumped-up charge. She straightened primly in her chair and set her face in an expression of bewildered innocence. The captain laid down the report and reached for a sheet of paper that he scanned quickly. “It says here that you are the artist responsible for drawing a mural on the convent wall of the Sisters of Charity. Is that right?”

“Yes,” Bridgette answered in a tremulous voice, wondering how the designer who might have betrayed her would know that. “I did not realize that I was doing anything wrong. I had the permission of the mother superior. I thought…the painting would bring pleasure to the people in the neighborhood.”

The captain looked up and his tired gaze flashed surprise as if just now finding this young thing before his desk, merely a girl dressed in stylish, grown-up clothes. “You were reported speaking English to several passersby familiar to the area who also seemed to know the language. How did you come to learn English, Mademoiselle—” the captain referred to the sheet “—Bernadette Dufor?”

Bridgette could feel herself grow warm. Did that mean that the rest of the team had also been arrested? Were they here? Were they the ones being tortured in the room upstairs? She ran her tongue over dry lips. Oh, God, the blind beggar! He was the informer.

“I…my aunt,” Bridgette said, improvising as she explained. “She married an American soldier after the First World War. He taught her English, and she—she taught me some of the language.”

“Your aunt and the American soldier…they settled here in France?”

“No, they went to America.”

“Then how did you learn the American language? Did you live there, too?”

Bridgette wet her lips again. “No, they—they divorced and she returned to France. That’s when she taught me. She—she’s dead now. She was killed in the Allied bombings of Saint-Nazaire in November of 1942.”