“Merci, monsieur, but I believe I will not have to trouble you after all,” Bridgette said to the wagon driver, almost faint from the pleasure and relief of seeing the couturier. Tears trickled into big smiles as Bridgette, at eighty pounds, was swallowed in an embrace of red linen and a mist of French perfume. Since the liberation, her OSS facilitator had been waiting outside the gates from morning until evening with hope of finding her among the survivors.

“How did you know that I was at Drancy?” Bridgette asked when they were on the way to the Convent of the Sisters of Charity, where Sister Mary Frances had “commanded” that she be brought if she were found. She would report to her safe house tomorrow, but for now she was eager to see Sister Mary Frances and the nuns again, sink into a bathtub of hot suds and water, sleep on clean sheets, and ditch the dress she’d worn every day for more than two months. It would be wonderful to feel the touch of clean fabric against her skin again, though it would mean a delay in contacting Major Renault to relieve his worry that she’d died in a cell of the French Gestapo. She did not want to meet him looking as she was now.

“I knew what that hellbat had in mind for you when she did not return to the salon,” Jeanne explained. “We never saw her again. I was sure she’d had you imprisoned in Drancy, but of course I had no proof, not enough to report my suspicions to my OSS contact and get your people’s hopes up that there you might have a chance to stay alive. The last I was able to report was that you’d been arrested by the French Gestapo. I kept trying to find evidence of my suspicions. I am acquainted with a doctor who was allowed to work in the prison, and I showed him your picture, but he said he never saw you.”

“No, he wouldn’t have seen me,” Bridgette said. “I was never allowed outside.”

“Not in all those months you were imprisoned?” Jeanne asked, aghast.

“For Nicoline, Madame Richter’s cook and maid, it was close to four years.”