Legrand stuck the pipe back in the corner of his mouth and held it there, his elbow propped on his other arm, which crossed his middle. Studied, thoughtful. He tilted his head and stared at her without shame. Daisy tried to stare back, but the sheer glamour of him was too much for her. Those cheekbones, those blue eyes. He wore the same knitted vest as he had in Grandmère’s suite, over a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows to avoid staining them with ink, and all she could think was how unlike those tanned forearms were from Pierre’s forearms.
They were quite alone. In the front of the bookshop, the owner and his boy Philippe took care of the customers, but they might have existed in another country. Daisy looked down at the book in the middle of the table.
“The Scarlet Pimpernel. An inspiration, perhaps?”
“My dear madame, I have just told you I’m not an Englishman.”
She lifted the book and thumbed the pages. “A master of disguise and forgery, spiriting the persecuted out of Paris. I can’t imagine any resemblance.”
He reached out and pulled the book from her hands. “It’s a good story, that’s all.”
“It was my favorite, when I was a girl. When I was thirteen or fourteen, when I had all these romantic ideas.”
“Like honor?”
“Yes, honor. Among others. But we have business to discuss, I believe.”
Legrand sat up, knocked the ash from his pipe, and set it to one side. “True. The first thing, we must have a name for you.”
“You already know my name.”
“I mean a code, a secret name, so your identity isn’t compromised if some Gestapo squad should knock on my door one night and beg for a cigarette.”
“Is that likely?”
“I imagine you know the odds, more or less.”
He said it carelessly, but his eyes were serious, and his expression didn’t move. Daisy’s palms were damp. She had the feeling she was plunging off a cliff somehow, that she had closed her eyes and taken some giant, terrible leap without pausing to see what lay beneath, and now it was too late. Too late. Yes, she knew the odds. Of course she knew the odds. The odds were that she would likely die. She was going to die for this thing she was doing, let’s admit it, this cause that was so futile and so fraught, this defiance of the German occupation of France. Possibly her children, too, unless Pierre could protect them. And yet the blood pulsing through her veins right now, the keen perception of every detail around her, it wasn’t exactly terror, was it? It was something else. It was like coming to life. She glanced back down at the book and saw herself again, her young self, a ripening girl, all the new thoughts and emotions galloping down her limbs, all the romantic possibility, the possibility for life. And the real reason she had adored the book, which was not for the sake of the dashing Sir Percy, much as she longed for such a hero at that age, in her world made of nothing but school and home, and home being that strange, glamorous zoo of peculiar creatures known as the Ritz. She loved the book because of Marguerite St. Just. Brave, clever, irresistible French wife of the Scarlet Pimpernel. The toast of Paris. Marguerite, the French word for daisy.
“La Fleur,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“My code name is La Fleur.”
They went to work. Monsieur Legrand showed her the papers he had forged, the identity cards and the laissez-passers for a pair of Allied pilots downed over Belgium last month and now hidden in a safe house on rue de Bretagne. Daisy picked up the card belonging to one of them—new name Jean-Paul Bisset—and examined it closely. “But it’s perfect,” she said in amazement.
“Of course it is.”
She looked up. “How did you do this? How did you find such a talent?”
“My mother’s an artist. She taught me to draw and paint when I was young. And the first thing you do, when you’re learning to draw and paint, you copy the works of great artists.”
“Well, it’s remarkable.” She looked at his chin, which of course contained a small, perfect cleft, and thought, You’re remarkable.
He waved his hand and rose from the chair to take a pair of books from a nearby shelf. Daisy strained to read the titles, but his hands moved too quickly. He opened the front cover and peeled back the paper that lined it. The gold ring caught the light from the lamp at the corner of the table.
“Now look,” he said. “We tuck the papers inside the false lining of these books, here. Lay them flat, one for each cover. You see? Then just a touch of binder’s glue to hold it back down again.”