Read Chapter 36: The Personal Baggage

The hospital doors swung shut behind Étienne, and the noise of Paris hit him like a wave. Carriages clattered over cobblestones, vendors shouted the morning prices of bread and coal, and somewhere a church bell rang the hour with a sound that seemed almost jaunty. The cease-fire had brought a kind of brittle gaiety to the streets, as if the city had decided to celebrate before the terms could change.

He stood there with his coat hanging loose over his bandaged arm, the ache in his shoulder a dull, constant companion. The doctor had warned him again—gangrene moves faster than hope, he’d said—but Étienne had signed himself out anyway. What was the point of saving the arm if there was nothing left to hold with it?

Juliette was in London. Lucien was in London. The two people who had pulled him out of the wreckage of his own life were across the Channel, waiting for him to join them, and all he had to do was take a train to Calais and a boat to Dover. He had money in his pocket, Rothschild’s letter unopened in his breast pocket, and a reputation now as the mad balloonist who had survived the impossible.

He should go. He knew he should go.

Instead, he turned left and walked toward the Bois de Boulogne, where the remnants of the balloon corps kept their last serviceable aircraft. The gasworks had been damaged in the shelling, but a hydrogen envelope could still be filled, if you knew the right people and paid the right price. His hand drifted to the locket around his neck, the one constant he had carried through the siege, through the crash, through everything. The photograph inside was faded now, the woman’s face worn to a ghost of itself. Marguerite Lemaire. The name had been on Delacroix’s list of French traitors. But Juliette had written that she was alive in Berlin, connected to everything.

The woman in the locket was not his mother.

That was what he had believed for thirty years. His mother had died when he was an infant, or so his father had told him. She had been a simple dressmaker, taken by fever in the winter of ’41. His father had burned her photograph in a fit of grief and never spoken of her again, and Étienne had grown up with a hole where a mother should have been, filling it with the image of an angel from a holy card he’d stolen from church.

But the name had nagged at him. Marguerite Lemaire. He had seen it on Delacroix’s list, and something in his chest had lurched, a recognition he could not explain. And then Juliette had written, *she is connected to everything*, and Étienne had known what he had to do before he could board any boat for London.

Two hours of negotiation with a gas-fitter who owed him a favor from the siege, and he was aloft.

The balloon was smaller than the *Neptune*, barely large enough for one man and a few sandbags. The wind was kind, pushing him northeast, and he let it carry him, watching the scarred countryside slide beneath him. The Prussian lines were quiet now, the guns silent, but he could see the camps stretching like a gray stain across the fields. He flew high enough to be invisible, a speck against the clouds, and the cold bit through his thin coat.

He landed at dawn on the outskirts of Berlin, in a field of turnips that had already been harvested. The balloon crumpled around him, and he spent an hour burying the envelope and the basket beneath a pile of dead stalks, marking the spot with a crooked fence post. He would need it again if things went well. If things went badly, he wouldn’t need anything.

The city smelled of coal smoke and soldier sweat. The victory celebrations had already begun, flags hanging from windows, and he moved through the crowds with his head down, a Frenchman in a Prussian city, one more ragged refugee among the thousands displaced by the war. The address Juliette had given him was in a working-class district, a narrow building wedged between a butcher’s shop and a church that had lost its steeple to a French shell.

He knocked at the door on the third floor and waited.

An old woman opened it, her face creased with suspicion. She looked him up and down, took in his French coat, his bandaged arm, his unshaven jaw, and began to close the door.

“I’m looking for Helene Weiss,” he said.

The name was from the list. Marguerite Lemaire was living as Helene Weiss, a widow of a Prussian officer killed at Sedan, a woman of quiet respectability who attended church every Sunday and kept to herself.

The old woman hesitated. “Who asks?”

“Her son.”

The lie came out before he could stop it, or perhaps it wasn’t a lie at all. He had come to find out. He had come to learn the truth about the woman who had haunted the edges of his life, the name he had carried in a locket without ever knowing why.

The old woman studied him for a long moment, then stepped back. “She doesn’t receive visitors. But you can leave a message.”

“I’ve come a long way. I’m not leaving a message.”

He pushed past her into the narrow hallway, ignoring her protest, and climbed the stairs two at a time, his bad arm throbbing in protest. The doors were all closed, but he listened at each one until he heard a woman’s voice, humming an old French lullaby.

He stopped. His knees went weak.

The lullaby was the same one his father used to sing to him on stormy nights, the same words, the same melody, slightly off-key. He had not heard it in thirty years.

He opened the door.

She was sitting by the window, mending a shirt, her gray hair pulled back in a bun. She looked up when the door opened, and her hands went still on the fabric. She looked at him, really looked, and he saw her take in his eyes, his hair, the shape of his jaw. He saw the recognition bloom in her face like a bruise.

“Étienne,” she said.

His name in her mouth sounded like a confession.

“You know who I am.” It was not a question.

She set down the shirt and stood, her hands clasped in front of her. She was older than he had imagined, but the bones were the same, the high cheekbones, the wide-set eyes that he saw in the mirror every morning.

“I always knew you would find me,” she said. “I only hoped it would be after I was dead.”

He pulled the locket from his collar and held it up. “Marguerite Lemaire. Traitor. Spy. The woman who sold her country for coin.” His voice cracked. “My mother.”

She flinched. “Is that what they told you?”

“It’s what the evidence says. Delacroix’s list. The conspirators’ names. Yours was on it. Explain that.”

She moved toward him, her steps slow and halting. She stopped an arm’s length away, close enough that he could see the tears standing in her eyes. “I didn’t sell secrets for coin, Étienne. I sold them for your life.” She reached for his hand, and he let her take it. “They had you. When you were small, before your father took you away from me. They said they would kill you if I refused. So I gave them what they wanted. Names. Routes. Weaknesses. Every piece of information they asked for, I gave them, and every piece felt like a knife in my own chest.”

“My father told me you died.”

“I let him believe it. It was the only way to keep you safe. If the Prussians thought I was loyal to them, they would never come after you. And if your father thought I was dead, he would never try to find me and walk into their trap.” She squeezed his hand. “I chose you, Étienne. I chose you a thousand times, and I would choose you again.”

He pulled his hand away. The anger was there, hot and sudden, but underneath it was something else. Something that felt like grief.

“Then why did you leave me?” he heard himself ask. “Why did you let me grow up believing I had no mother?”

She opened her mouth to answer, and then the sound of boots on the stairs came through the door, and her face went pale. “You were followed.”

“No. I flew over the lines. No one saw me.”

But the boots were closer now, and there was a sharp knock at the door below, a voice calling out in German, demanding that Helene Weiss open up.

She looked at him, and her eyes were the same blue as his own. “They found you anyway.” She went to the window, looked down at the street, and her mouth tightened. “They were always going to find you. That’s why I wrote to Rothschild. That’s why I told that girl in London where to look.” She turned to face him. “I wanted you to know the truth before they killed me. And now they’re here to do it.”