skinnier, but there was no mistaking that look of hers and the paralyzing feeling I felt in my knees when she locked eyes with me. I nodded.
‘Then tell me what you know,’ she said.
‘There’s a raid planned for tomorrow. In Laudemarière.’
‘I must hurry,’ she said to the man beside her. He pulled a gun from each pocket, and she hid them on her person, one in a holster around her calf, the other down the front of her shirt. ‘Stay here and man the radio,’ she said to him. ‘If I’m not back by sunrise, then something went wrong.’
Her eyes flicked to mine. ‘I hope I’m not too late.’
I paced inside Mama’s dark kitchen, trying to find a way to calm the pulse in my veins that had been thumping since I left the brasserie. Changing into a comfortable housedress didn’t help. Mama did nothing but watch me from the woodblock, her backside flush against the counter.
‘What’s wrong with you, Adèle? You did well tonight. Now be at rest with it.’
I laughed in jest. ‘I feel like a revved car lurching and stopping, lurching and stopping, all the way down the road. I’m either on full alert or left to wait, and wondering what the hell to do.’
Mama lit a lantern with her lighter. ‘Follow me,’ she said, walking toward the cellar.
‘I need more than a drink, Mama.’
‘Just follow me, Adèle.’ The hem of Mama’s crème peignoir brushed the dirt floor and got dirtier and dirtier as she moved toward the back of the cellar, her feet black from being outside without shoes. Bottles of wine had been pulled from the racks and sat upright against the wall, showing Papa’s dwindling supply. Mama waved a hand at the wine. ‘Not this,’ she said. ‘That is not why I asked you down here.’
‘Then why?’ I said. ‘If we’re not going to drink…’
Mama opened Charlotte’s chest of paints. ‘Why don’t you paint?’ Mama said, taking a tube of paint into her hands.
I laughed. ‘Paint?’
‘Painting always relaxed Charlotte. It’s why she got started.’
I glanced at the paint in the chest, the metal tubes shining from the lantern’s light. ‘I don’t know how to paint, Mama.’
‘Have you ever tried?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘actually I have. Besides, Charlotte wouldn’t want me using her paints.’
‘Charlotte isn’t here, now is she?’ Mama pulled Charlotte’s old painting palette from the chest and stuck it under her arm as she dug through the paints. ‘Someone might as well use these.’
Painting at the convent felt like a task. I didn’t see how it could be relaxing. ‘I don’t think—’
‘You have someplace else to go?’ Mama said.
‘But what about the slashed canvases? Should I paint the walls?’ I joked.
‘Yes,’ Mama said, looking up from the chest. ‘Paint the wall. Nobody will ever see it down here.’
‘You’re serious?’ I watched Mama pick through the tubes; she was intent on me painting, no matter what I said. I sighed, studying the stones and feeling them with both of my hands. The cracks and grooves between the rocks were rough, not smooth like a real canvas, but I wasn’t painting a masterpiece—it didn’t have to be perfect. And like Mama said, nobody would see it. ‘And you think it will help?’
‘I really do, Adèle.’
I held my hand out. ‘Give me the paint.’ I squeezed paint from several different tubes onto Charlotte’s paint-stained palette, choosing from an array of brushes tucked inside her cotton organizer. I picked the fattest brush, as Mama suggested, and twirled it in a blob of red paint, slapping it onto the wall. The bristles glided over the stones, sticky, slippery, swirling.
‘The colour’s bright.’ Even in the dimly lit cellar, the red jumped from the wall like a flame. ‘Unusually bright.’
Mama lit a cigarette and talked as she puffed it to life. ‘That’s because of the cadmium in the oils—expensive little suckers. Charlotte had to have the best paint.’
‘Of course, she did,’ I said.
Mama tightened her peignoir before taking a seat on a dusty old chair wedged in the corner. ‘Charlotte always said inspiration came from within.’ Mama tapped the middle of her forehead with one finger. ‘Said it was always in her mind.’
‘In my mind…’ I stood in front of the stone wall. ‘Should I take a deep breath?’ I kicked off my shoes and got comfortable in my housedress, thinking I should count backward and think about the grass and the sun to find inspiration.
Mama shrugged. ‘Do what feels right to you.’ She nestled her back into the crook of