Duchess (23 page)

She wound her arms up around his neck. “How long is the trip to France?”

He leaned forward, kissed her, his touch sweet, even patronizing. “Too long.”

Oh. She frowned. “I was hoping it was not long enough.” She molded herself to him, smiled.

He unwound her arms from his neck. Was that a blush? “I can't stay,” he said. “I have to check in with McDuff. Will you be okay?”

She flipped down on the seat, picking up the script, hating the tightness in her chest. “I'm just rewriting.”

When he didn't move, she looked up at him. His smile had vanished, and now he was simply watching her, something in his expression she couldn't recognize. A softness fell upon her heart, the way he stood there in the shadow of the late hour. He looked tired, and for the first time she longed to pull him down next to her, lay his head on her lap, and ease the furrows from his brow. “What is it?”

“You're so beautiful, Rosie. It takes my breath away.”

Oh. The fist in her chest eased. She reached out and took his hand. “I'll be waiting for you when you come back.”

He bent and lifted her hand to his lips. “I'm counting on it.” Then he winked and stepped out of the compartment.

Oh, how she loved that man. The thought caught her, stilled her. No. No. She couldn't love this man. They'd made a silent, tacit agreement not to profess their love, and he'd kept his part. No, what they had, right now, would have to be enough.

She couldn't afford any more. Regardless of how many times he called her beautiful.

She flipped open to the script, began reading through the production directions, taking notes. Yes, nothing a little rewriting wouldn't fix.

The train meandered through the countryside, north toward Vienna first, and then south to Paris. Night descended around them, the houses blinking in the night like eyes as the train passed them. She took her dinner, wiener snitchzel and brioche, in her compartment, finished it with tea, and then curled up with a copy of
Gone with the Wind
, a book Irene had sent her for Christmas. She couldn't decide if she loved or despised Scarlett for her treatment of Rhett, her unending devotion to Ashley Wilkes. She did admire her spirit. “
God as my witness, I'll never be hungry again
.” According to the rumors Irene had dug up, Jack Junior was looking at it, maybe even had already optioned it. Those Warner Brothers, always one step ahead. But perhaps Palace Studios could still get their hands on it if Jack Warner couldn't find a star to wheedle into the role. She'd have to pen Irene a note and ask her to inquire.

Sometimes operations at the studio felt so far away.

She watched the lights of Vienna draw close and the landscape turn into a sparkling array of glitter. The train wound through the city toward the station. The city seemed to have transformed overnight into a hotbed of Nazi symbolism, the flag with the black swastika hanging from buildings. As they pulled into the station, a cluster of armed soldiers, helmeted and wearing the German symbol on their arms, approached the train.

Her breath tightened in her chest as Rolfe suddenly appeared on the platform. He held papers and handed them to one of the soldiers.

She watched him, his broad shoulders, the way he gestured to the train, his face solemn. The soldier shoved the papers back at him. Shook his head.

They pushed past him, approaching the train, and her stomach tightened. Something about their demeanor—

A shout, and they stopped. She saw Rolfe talking with a German officer.

Tall, dark blond, wide shoulders, a frame that suggested command.

Herr…Staffen? Otto—she put the name to the face now.

He wore a military uniform—similar to the one at the New Year's ball, only this was black, and adorned with the armband.

Now, he extended his hand over his head, as if pledging allegiance to someone. She watched as Rolfe mimicked it.

“That's the Nazi salute,” Hale said quietly.

She jerked, turned. “What are you doing here?”

“I—I—” He was white, however, and she reached out to him.

“Sit down, Hale. You look like you might pass out. Rolfe is talking to the Germans. I'm sure everything is in order.”

“He's talking to the Gestapo, the military police.” He leaned forward. “Like he knows him.”

“I think he does. He has a number of friends who are—” Nazis. She looked back at Rolfe, the way he smiled, affable, easy with Otto.

Nazis.

She glanced back at Hale. He was staring at her, his breathing thick.

“Rolfe isn't a supporter of the Nazis. He's Belgian. His mother was killed by the Germans. I can guarantee you that he is not a supporter.”

Hale's jaw ground tight. “Of course not.”

But she pressed her hand against her stomach as she watched Otto return his papers, clamp Rolfe on the shoulder like a friend.

As Rolfe returned to the train.

As it continued its journey, out of the new Austrian Third Reich.

Rolfe knocked on her door later, after they'd escaped deep into the Austrian countryside, finally sliding it open to peer inside.

She considered him a long moment, standing there in the dusky glow of the corridor, poised at the entrance of her door. Then she put down her book, looked up, and smiled, patting the seat next to her. “Let's work on those new lines.”

If she could, Rosie would push her hands over her ears and blunt the sounds of the machine guns, the bombs shattering the earth and desecrating the sky just beyond the farmhouse Rolfe had transformed for the finale of his film. Set in northeast France, just outside Luxembourg, on the Orne River in the Lorraine Provence, the tiny town of Etain still simmered with memories of the German Occupation.

It all felt too real, the fear in the villagers' eyes, the German military presence invading the town, the French army battling for their land against the Kaiser. The stench of gunpowder, the rawness of overturned earth, tempered the freshness of the spring air. Rolfe had simply re-opened the trenches, re-erected the barbed wire fences, and called upon the villagers to fill in as extras.

He'd let their crew from Austria go nearly as soon as they crossed the French border, it seemed. And why not? They'd spend three weeks re-creating the French countryside under siege.

All the while, Rosie helped rewrite the script, inserting into it an ending that seemed real.

Yes, Bridget did give Colin her heart, but only after he showed her that he could be trusted, that he wouldn't leave her.

Rolfe had approved it, and as she learned her lines her heart began to wrap around the truth.

If she would give her heart to anyone, it would be Rolfe Van Horne. But she wasn't Bridget, didn't have Bridget's strength, so she'd give it to Hale instead, at least on screen.

After all, Hale as Colin seemed a replica of Rolfe. Strong. Kind. Protective. Faithful.

Most importantly, Rosie knew in her heart that Rolfe could never be allied with the Nazi Germans. Not after the way he spent hours listening to the villagers recount stories, only twenty years young, of the German invasion.

“They took everything—livestock, food, everything in the factories. They left nothing but rubble, only the L'église Saint Martin and the town hall standing. People starved, children conscripted into forced labor,” Pierre Leblanc told them one night while tending bar at the Hotel de'Etain.

A small man with rounded shoulders, he wore the ten-acre look of a man who knew the labyrinth of the trenches, his eyes dark, a row of tattoos on his scarred arms. “Came marching right through Luxembourg after raping Belgium and moved into Etain like they owned it. I escaped south, to Verdun.” He shook his head. “The night was the worst. We'd hear the soldiers caught in No Man's Land calling out to their mothers, or begging us to finish them.”

He picked up a glass, polished it, seeing the past in its reflection. “One night, a pal of mine snuck out to a farm. We found a well and drank our fill. We were sleeping when a couple of Germans snuck up on us. We watched them in the darkness, drinking from that same well. We could have shot them right there but we didn't.” He set down the glass. Stared at it. “Right before dawn, a little girl, about eight came out of the house. She was filthy, as if she'd been hiding there—and she must have been, because the place was nearly decimated. She didn't see us, or the Germans, as she snuck out to the well. Must have been the pump that woke them because, in a second, they were on their feet.”

Rosie could see the story in his eyes then, the horror of watching a little girl murdered.

“Then, all of a sudden, Louis simply got up and ran at them, screaming. They unloaded their guns into him, but I grabbed the girl and ran. We made it back to our trench.” He looked at them. “Louis died right there, by the well.”

Rosie watched memories flicker across Rolfe's face and she reached out, wove her hand through his.

He hadn't left the set, not once after they started filming. Hovering over McDuff, he seemed intent on getting every shot right. And every night he found her, asked her to sit with him in the shadows of the hotel, watching the sun surrender into the forested hills, the rolling farmland.

Sometimes, he didn't talk.

Often, he simply pulled her into his arms, held on to her.

“Someday, man will figure out that fighting is not the answer,” he said into her soft hair, kissing her, running his fingers through its silky length. She still wore the wig on set, just to protect the new growth now from the hair sprays, heating irons, and peroxide.

“Until then, we'd better hope we have people like Pierre to stand in the shadows and not shoot.”

She turned in his arms, cupped her hand against his cheek. “You're so much like your mother.”

He stared at her then, something she couldn't read in his eyes, then pressed his lips to hers. She tasted salt in his touch.

The production had become the talk of the village—not difficult in a community of less than a thousand. Especially in a place where everyone had lost a beloved soul. Even the young adults, the ones who had been toddlers when the Germans advanced, wore the haunted eyes of the wounded.

It gave her the material she needed to bring Bridget's desperation to life. Her willingness to spy on the enemy, to house the wounded, to defy the Germans. She became Bridget, refusing to surrender.

And when Colin arrived, she embodied a woman who held on to her heart. Until…

The final scene took place in a makeshift medical tent behind French lines. They'd transformed the farmhouse into a hospital, with wounded scattered about the set. Sophie had torn her dress, matted it with mud, turned her wig to a tangled weave. Rosie layered mud down her face and staggered into camp holding the weight of a soldier she'd found hiding in a trench, blinded by mustard gas. A “beardy” they called him.

It was only after she delivered him to a doctor that the dialogue started. She hit her mark and turned to the camera, holding an expression of devastation.

In that moment, she put herself in the hospital, at Dash's bedside, and in Central Park, holding Guthrie's battered body, and even in the courtroom when Jack deserted them all. She stood there, caught in the moment when life overwhelmed, when the vastness of the destruction could choke her, and let the camera have it all.

And then she heard him. “Bridget.”

She turned and found Colin broken on a stretcher, blood soaking his shirt, a bloody rag around his belly.

She ran to him, ripped away the rag. Shook her head. “Not like this.”

His makeup artist had left his face intact, although dirty and sweaty with war, and now she ran her hand down his cheek, raising her voice over the din for the sound boxes. “Master Colin, what have you done?”

“I was searching for you, Bridget.” He grabbed her hand. “I thought I'd lost you.”

“You'll never lose me, Colin,” She heard the words emerge, but they didn't feel right. Not…enough. Shallow. But they'd put too much into this scene to reshoot.

“
Everyone brings a piece of themselves to the stage. Find that piece
.”

You'll never lose me, Guthrie.

No, that didn't feel right either.

And not for Dash. But, perhaps. You'll never… Rolfe.

She stared into Hale's eyes, saw in them the blue of Rolfe's. “
I'll tell you every day that you're beautiful if that's what you need to hear
.”

She couldn't lose him. Couldn't let him slip away from her arms.

She shook her head, leaned in, put it all into her words. “Don't you dare leave me, Colin. Not now. Not after everything.”

Hale frowned, jarred by her ad-lib of her lines. Around her, more bombs fell, products of the sound team. She was supposed to jump up, to get soldiers to help drag Colin to safety, but she couldn't move, caught in his gaze, the surprise in his eyes.

“You do love me,” she said, pressing her hand to his face.