Amelia padded down the cold hall to her room. With heating oil rationed, the house wasn’t warm like last winter and a perpetual
chill hung over everything. She crawled into bed and pulled the thick covers up under her chin, shivering more from fear than
cold. Wallis’s ability to inadvertently get herself into trouble was more terrifying than the German Army, except this time,
if Wallis made a grand mistake it might cost Amelia too.
Chapter Seventeen
Paris, May 10, 1940
The wail of air raid sirens broke the morning stillness. Amelia and Wallis looked up from their breakfast and cocked their ears to listen.
“Is it a drill?” Wallis went pale beneath her makeup.
“I don’t know.” There’d been fighting in Norway for days, the Phony War quickly turning into a real one. Every day, the newspapers reported on the battles inching closer to France while assuring readers the French Army would stop any German attempt to cross the border. Everyone prayed it was true, but the very real possibility that it was a lie was growing by the moment.
They waited, listening, until they heard the sound that settled it. The antiaircraft guns boomed, rattling the windows and the chandelier hanging over the dining table. The drone of airplane motors flying low above the city echoed beneath the sirens.
“They’re going to kill us,” Wallis cried.
“To the wine cellar.” Amelia hurried around the table and pulled a near frozen Wallis to her feet. This snapped her out of her shock and she broke from Amelia’s grip and without a look back bolted for the wine cellar, leaving Amelia to gather the maids; Mr. Phillips, the Duke’s new equerry; Mr. Ladbroke; Mr. Hale; and Mademoiselle Moulichon and guide them to safety.
They waited between the racks of dusty wine bottles for over an hour for the sirens and the barrage of antiaircraft fire to end. They expected bombs to explode at any minute but they never came, and an hour later the all clear sounded.
“Go up and see if it’s really over.” Wallis pushed Amelia toward the stairs.
Amelia wondered why it was up to her to check but she supposed someone had to do it. None of the others were capable of moving. Mademoiselle Moulichon had spent the last hour crying into the maid’s arms while the cook and Mr. Ladbroke had sweated profusely. Wallis had twisted her handkerchief between her hands, nearly catatonic with fear. Amelia had given up trying to talk to or calm any of them.
Amelia climbed the stone steps, pushed open the cellar door, and listened. Everything was still, like in the middle of the night, but the sun was up and catching the bits of dust hanging in the air. Outside, the street was unusually still, the steady stream of cars missing. Whatever the situation, she couldn’t gauge it from here. There’d be a better view from the roof, where she could see something of the city but she’d be exposed. As she crept up the stairs, she hoped a fighter plane didn’t shoot her or blow the house to smithereens.
She stepped onto the roof and saw the small puffs of dark smoke from the antiaircraft artillery drifting off with the breeze. They lost their shape and faded into the sooty morning air fed by coal fires in homes all over Paris. She approached the edge to get a view of the street and some of the taller buildings around Boulevard Suchet. They were all standing, with no fires raging. A man hurried by on the sidewalk below.
“What happened?” Amelia called down to him.
He stopped and looked at her, one foot turned to go. “German fighter planes crossed Paris then headed west. They’re all over Western Europe. The Germans invaded the Low Countries and are pushing south through Belgium.” He rushed off without saying more.
“It’s all clear,” Amelia called down the cellar stairs, and one by one the others came up. Amelia turned on the radio in the sitting room and everyone listened to the BBC report of German bombers over the Thames and coastal France. They hadn’t attacked, and the newscaster suggested they’d been a distraction from the German movements through the Low Countries.
“Will they invade Paris?” Mademoiselle Moulichon asked in French thick with panic and worry.
Wallis sat closest to the radio, playing with her emerald engagement ring.
“I’m sure we’re perfectly safe here. The French Army won’t let Paris fall to the Germans,” Amelia reassured the frightened staff but she wasn’t sure if they believed it. “Isn’t that right, Your Royal Highness?”
“What?” Wallis finally noticed the servants waiting for her to take the lead. She suddenly remembered herself and her place as chatelaine. “Of course, but if any of you wish to go home, you may do so.”
Mademoiselle Moulichon, Mr. Hale, Mr. Phillips, and Mr. Ladbroke chose to stay. The chef and most of the maids and footmen decided to join their families on the outskirts of Paris.
Amelia spent the rest of the morning settling their wages and typing up letters of reference. She was glad for the work. It kept her mind off the radio blaring news of German movements, especially when Monsieur Giraudoux, the French Minister of Information, came on to declare, “The real war has begun.”
They lived as normally as possible for the next four days while listening to radio reports of the Germans pushing deeper into Belgium and Luxembourg toward the Maginot Line. They went to the Ritz to pack boxes for the refugees arriving with each new train from the north. Half the volunteers went to the station to help tend to the people’s wounds, offer food, and reunite separated children with their desperate parents. The volunteers returned with horrific stories of German airplanes strafing civilians at the Belgian stations. The American hospital was filled with the wounded.
On the fourth day, Amelia leaned against the cream stone of the Ritz, her neck and shoulders stiff from work and worry. She closed her eyes and allowed the May sunshine to caress her face, but kept her ears alert for air raid sirens, artillery, or the roar of planes. The Paris skies had been clear since that first morning, and she heard nothing except the usual hum of traffic on the boulevards.
“Mrs. Montague, thank heavens I found you.”
Amelia opened her eyes to see Mr. Metcalf hurrying toward her.
“What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in Vincennes with His Royal Highness.”
“We were until things turned dicey.”
“He deserted?”
“He said he’d done enough and there wasn’t any reason to stay. I have no idea what he’ll do next but he’ll do something; it won’t be the right thing but it’ll be something.”
His lack of faith in the Duke was as unnerving as his being here.
“We have to get back to Boulevard Suchet.” Mr. Metcalf frowned. “His Royal Highness wants the Duchess moved to Biarritz. With the Germans on the move, the roads are full of people, and if we don’t start soon, who knows where we’ll get stuck.”
It took hours to pack up the three cars and the truck Amelia was forced to hire because the Duke and Wallis were determined to take everything but the kitchen sink. Trying to talk them out of it was like trying to convince a child to let go of a lollipop. Amelia understood the Duke wanting to move his priceless antiques, they were practically historic artifacts, but Wallis clung to her things like a lifeboat. She stood in the dining room with Grandmother Warfield’s china set in piles on the glossy table, arguing with the Duke and Amelia about packing them.
“I won’t leave it behind.” Wallis clutched one of the pink dinner plates to her chest. “This and Grandma’s brooch are the only things of hers I have, the only mementos Uncle Sol would give me. I can’t lose them.”
“They’ll be safer here than bouncing along a road where they might be stolen or broken.” Amelia was ready to smash the entire set and be done with it. Every moment they wasted arguing over these silly things was one the Germans spent creeping closer to France.
“Or looted once ruffians realize we’re gone,” Wallis screeched, her voice higher and coarser than usual.
“Monsieur Hardeley will be here to watch over the house as he’s done every time we’ve traveled, and the gendarmes will protect the neighborhood,” Amelia assured her.
“I don’t trust the French police as far as I could throw them.”
