worry more than I do. Are you so concerned about my safety? What does it matter if she sees me?”
“I told you, the fewer people who see a link between you and me, the better.”
“You don’t trust her, then?”
“She’s not much more than a child, but an impetuous one and entirely too talkative. It’s best for all of us not to exchange names or faces.”
“Why, she’s hardly a child, Edward!”
Edward glanced at Isa sleeping peacefully under a single beam of moonlight. Here was the girl Edward had known for years—and yet, she was different. The bones of her face were more defined, her neck somehow longer, her eyes larger. She was taller than the last time he’d seen her, yet she’d lost that gangly look. Perhaps because of the bulky peasant clothing. He realized he liked her better dressed in such a way; it removed her from the Isa he’d known, the one with the family so rich they hardly knew what to do with all that money.
Isa stirred and he turned from looking at her, all but pushing Rosalie back into her home. “Go inside, Rosalie. I’ll see you soon.” Then he closed the door.
By the time he faced Isa again, she’d scrambled to her feet, adjusting her clothing and slipping her cloak into place.
“Who was that?”
“No one you need to know.”
“But—” She stopped before finishing her own statement, staring at him, her mouth agape. “Edward! You—your face!”
“Oh.” He dared not go farther into the city without his Brussels identity firmly in place. Just having the disguise in place made him feel less like the Edward Kirkland, guilty of so many crimes against Germany, and more like the innocent man he portrayed himself to be. “Permit me to introduce myself. I am Nicholas van Esbjörn, a fifty-year-old businessman of Danish lineage. I have lived in Brussels most of my adult life—twenty-five, no, thirty years. And you are my niece now, still Anna Feldson. I hope you learn to answer to that name if a soldier sees your papers and calls you that, Anna.”
“Oh, Edward.” She shook her head. “I would hardly know you.”
He knew Rosalie was the best. She had studied under the master himself, Lawrence Auber, the premier makeup artist at La Monnaie, the most famous opera house in Brussels—and, Brussels would argue, the best in all Europe. Perhaps it wasn’t such a stretch to make him look older than his years, since the Germans had starved and beaten the youth out of him shortly after their arrival. Even since his return, what little food he ate never had a chance to soften the rough edges of his bones. But with Rosalie’s artwork, his premature pallor now sported a line here and there, a touch of gray to his dark hair. Even his neck, if one looked close enough, was marred by new wrinkles that a man his real age of nearly twenty-three would not see for another score of years. He was, to look at him, past the age of a soldier on either side of the war.
“Better get used to it,” he said as he led her outside and down the cobbled path. “This is how I live when I’m in Brussels.”
“Where are we going?”
“To my mother.”
“Oh! At last!”
A twinge of old jealousy teased Edward, something he hadn’t felt since in knee pants. His mother, at least, would be happy to see Isa—happy but undoubtedly angry, too.
“But where, Edward?”
Edward slowed his pace when he noticed she barely kept up. “Right here in Brussels. Although,” he added with a glance, “not in your Upper Town. She’s with a Flemish woman along the Rue Haute in the Quartier des Marolles, not far below the German eye in the Palais de Justice.”
“The Germans are in the Palais de Justice?”
He laughed at her naiveté. “They’re everywhere, Isa.”
They walked for some time, staying away from major intersections and keeping to narrow alleys. Edward didn’t believe in unnecessary risk. He drew Isa with him to the shadows if he saw any of the Kaiser’s soldiers or heard the clop of horses pulling a cart.
After a while Edward stopped before one of the buildings. He’d been here often enough in the past year or more since gaining his freedom—such as it was—but still he had to count the doors from the corner, they were all so much alike. Nothing adorned the structure, neither flower boxes nor welcome mat, not even shutters at the windows. Though swept clean, this home was stark and plain.