“Indeed it is. The nuns and residents of the neighborhood have been fierce in seeing to its protection. Only one violator has dared to brave the ramparts to do mischief to it, and it was really nothing, a simple mark across one of those ribbonlike plants—” Jeanne broke off, seeing the sudden change in Bridgette’s face. “It is nothing to be alarmed about, ma ché​rie,” she said quickly. “It was made with a medium the rain has nearly washed off.”

“Do you know when it appeared?”

“Shortly after you’d been arrested in June, I believe.”

Bridgette studied the faint mark while they waited to be admitted through the courtyard door, locked now even during the day since the burgeoning unrest in the streets. Had Liverwort tried to contact her, not knowing she’d been arrested? Did that mean she was still alive? The major would be able to tell her that as well as the fate of the others. Hope, unfelt for a long time, suddenly bloomed like a dormant flower. What if they had all made it? What if they’d keep that date in the New York Public Library after all?

She heard the bolt being thrown, and Sister Mary Frances swooped through the courtyard door to drown her this time in swaths of black cotton and wafts of carbolic soap.

After sending Bridgette off for a bath and change of clothes, the mother superior placed a telephone call to a number locked in her private files. When the recipient came on the line, she said, “Mademoiselle Bernadette Dufor is here at the Convent of the Sisters of Charity, monsieur. She has just been released from Drancy, where she has been incarcerated since the middle of June.”

Sister Mary Frances was quite sure the man she’d met only once whose name she did not know was so shocked that he almost dropped the receiver. “Mon Dieu!” he exclaimed. “He thought she was dead!”

It was not for her to question who “he” was, so Sister Mary Frances responded simply, “I assure you that Mademoiselle Dufor is here, alive and in the flesh…what little there is left of it.”

“I will make a few telephone calls and then come to you at once,” Henri said.

Bridgette had finished her bath and changed into one of her dresses, which now appeared to have been borrowed from a woman three sizes larger, when a nun knocked on her door to inform her that a visitor had called for her downstairs. He was waiting in the mother superior’s office.

“Who?” she asked, alarmed. No one knew that she was here.

“I don’t know, mademoiselle. A Frenchman.”

Ah, No Name, Bridgette thought, relieved. “I’ll be right down,” she said.