Flight Patterns - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Karen White is the New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty novels, including the Tradd Street series, Dreams of Falling, The Night the Lights Went Out, Flight Patterns, The Sound of Glass, A Long Time Gone, and The Time Between. She is the coauthor of The Forgotton Room and The Glass Ocean with New York Times bestselling authors Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig. She grew up in London but now lives with her husband and two children near Atlanta, Georgia.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2016 Karen White

Prologue

“The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.”

Henry David Thoreau

—Ned Bloodworth’s Beekeeper’s Journal

September 1943

Provence, France

Dead bees fell from the bruised dusk sky, their papery bodies somersaulting in the air, ricocheting like spent shells off the azure-painted roof of the hive. Giles straightened, breathing in the heavy scents of lavender and honey, of summer grasses and his own sweat. And something else, too. Something chemical and out of place in his fields of purple and gold. Something that made sense out of the bees lying like carrion for the swarming swallows above.

“Ah! Vous dirais-je, maman,” sang his three-year-old daughter with her clear, perfect voice from her perch on an upturned bucket, unaware of the sky or the bees or the tremor of fear that shook the breath from his lungs.

“Colette, calme-toi,” he said, putting his finger to his lips.

The little girl stopped singing and stared up at her father with a question in her dark eyes. He had never asked her to stop before.

Keeping his finger to his lips, Giles closed his eyes, listening. A low hum escaped from inside the hive, quieter now, a volume dial turned low on a radio. A sign to any beekeeper that something was wrong. The queen had died, perhaps. Or any of the dreaded parasites—mites or beetles, even—had invaded the hive, taking over an entire population and killing them.

Or the entire colony had become aware, even before Giles, that the one thing he’d hoped and prayed would never happen was now waiting with open arms on his doorstep. And the bees had chosen a sudden death instead of a long, lingering passing.

He strained to listen, wanting to hear beyond the sound of the bees and the circling birds and his own breathing. There. There it was. The gurgle and thrum of multiple engines. Not cars. Trucks. Large trucks to transport as many people as possible, a slow convoy climbing its way through the small farms and vibrant fields of Provence.

It was inevitable, he supposed. As soon as the Germans had invaded the free zone in southern France the previous November, there was nobody to protect them. Not even a puppet government. His chest expanded and contracted as a cloud of dust and cut hay churned up by the trucks’ tires drifted over the winding dirt road in the far distance like poison descending on the valley.

He thought of the family now huddled in his barn, in the small room he’d created beneath the hidden trapdoor covered with bales of hay. A mother and father and three small children, the woman’s belly swollen with a fourth. He hadn’t even asked their names. These families came and went so frequently that he’d stopped asking. It was easier that way, later. When he’d learn that some hadn’t made it over the mountains to safety it was better that he hadn’t known their names.

Giles cursed under his breath. Three days before, when the cobbler had sent his new assistant, he’d known. He’d seen the way the young man’s eyes had darted about the barn, taking in the tidy table and bench pushed against the wall. The way the cobwebs had been swept out of the corners of the rafters. The neatly stacked tools, carefully placed. All signs of a woman’s touch, yet Giles’s wife had been dead for three years. Yes, Giles had known even then. And the bees had known, too.

Half an hour. That’s all he had before the trucks reached his farm, saw the brightly painted beehives and the stone house where his family had lived for almost two hundred years in the shadow of the château. Before they reached the barn and started moving the hay. His nostrils flared as the exhaust fumes overtook the sweet scents of his beloved fields, and he turned abruptly to Colette.

“C’est le temps.” He picked her up, her warm breath on his neck, and began to run.

She started to cry before they’d even reached the barn, her sobs already hiccups by the time the family had crawled from their hiding place and begun their escape across the lavender fields, their shadows chasing them through the rows of purple.

In the kitchen at the back of the farmhouse he removed the small leather suitcase that had been Colette’s mother’s, packed the same day he’d decided he could no longer be a bystander. Carefully he took the teapot from the hutch, where it had been nestled between its matching cups and plates, the feel of the china fragile beneath his rough hands, as he remembered his dead wife and how she’d loved beautiful things, how she’d loved to set the table and eat from the delicate plates. The china set had been a wedding gift from the château to his grandparents, a thank-you for his family’s years of service.

He wrapped it in a small towel and tucked it carefully amid Colette’s clothing inside the case, then lifted the little girl into his arms again, pressing his forehead to hers. “It will be all right, ma petite chérie. Madame Bosco has promised to look after you until I return.” He lifted the suitcase and began walking swiftly from the house toward the neighboring farm. The Boscos were a large Italian-French family with seven children of their own and had not asked him why he might need to leave his daughter for an unspecified amount of time. It was better they did not know.

“Non, Papa.” Colette’s bottom lip quivered, but he dared not slow or look behind him.

He pressed her blond head against his chest as he walked faster, seeing the lights of the stone farmhouse, white sheets flapping on the clothesline like a warning. The door opened before he reached it. Madame Bosco’s large, round form filled the doorway, the light illuminating her. A young girl, dark haired like her mother but slender as a reed, peered out from behind madame.

“Go back inside,” the woman said to the girl. “Keep your brothers and sisters away from the door.” She waited until her daughter had left, the girl stealing a glance over her shoulder only once. Madame Bosco turned back to Giles. “It is time?” she asked, her voice low.

Giles nodded, holding Colette even tighter, knowing what a terrible thing he was asking the child to do. And how this very scene must be playing out again and again all over the burning fields of Europe. A chorus of children’s cries and parents’ despair that fell on parched earth and thick air that smelled of burning things. The wailing might be heard, but no one was listening.

He touched his lips to Colette’s sweat-soaked forehead and tearstained cheek, breathing in the scent of her one last time. “You are my heart, ma chérie,” he said, holding her small fist tightly in his own larger one, replaying something they did every night. “And only you can set it free.” He opened his hand and wiggled his fingers like petals on a sunflower. Even in her misery, the little girl remembered her part and opened her own hand, the small fingers slow and heavy.

“Remember this,” Giles whispered in her ear, the folds and curves as delicate as a flower. “Remember you are my heart.”

Before he could change his mind, he handed Colette to the welcoming arms of Madame Bosco. There were tears in her eyes as she held the sobbing child. “We will keep her safe until you return. We have already instructed the children.”

Giles nodded, remembering her mother, as he stroked Colette’s blond curls. He slid a postcard from his pocket and handed it to madame, his thumb...