In this heart-shattering WWII novel set during the Nazi occupation of Paris, a brave young woman pays a terrible price to save those she holds most dear.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Ella Carey’s The Paris Maid, which is out
Louise Basset works as a housemaid at The Ritz Hotel, home to the most powerful Nazis in France. As she changes silk sheets and scrubs sumptuous marble bathtubs, she listens and watches, reporting all she can to the Resistance. The only secret she never tells is her own.
Everything changes for Louise when a young Allied pilot, hunted by the Nazis, is smuggled into the hotel. As he and Louise share a small carafe of red wine hidden amongst her cleaning bottles, she feels her heart begin to open. But what might happen if Louise finally confides in someone?
Years later, her granddaughter Nicole looks up at the ornate façade of the infamous Paris hotel. She is reeling from her recent discovery: a black and white photograph of her grandmother as a young woman, head shaved, branded a traitor. Devastated by her new legacy just as she’s about to start a family of her own, Nicole begins to search for answers.
When a French historian reveals that Louise once went by a different name, Nicole realizes there is more to her grandmother’s story. Was the woman who taught Nicole so much about family and loyalty a resistance fighter, or will her granddaughter have to live with the knowledge that she is descended from a traitor? And will Nicole be able to finally move forward with her life if she can uncover the truth?
PROLOGUE
PARIS, SUMMER 1944
The townsfolk’s scornful taunts rip through the air in the grand old square: femme tondue! Femme tondue! Shaven woman. Woman of shame. I bow my head and stare at the rain-soaked cobblestones, tears blurring my vision beneath the small wooden stool where they have forced me to sit.
My head jerks with every slice of my tormentor’s razor as it grazes my scalp, and I wince as the sharp tip comes too close and threatens to cut the thin skin on my head. My fair hair falls to the ground like feathers from a plucked bird, hovering in the air before coming to a gentle rest. The sight of my blond tendrils lying helplessly on the ground lodges deep in my soul, and I remind myself that I am simply one person in the grotesque circus that is captivating the towns of France.
It is not the Nazis who are shaving my head. No. Paris has been liberated and I am debased by France’s own jeering countrymen. I am surrounded by the newly free citizens of France.
When it is done, and my head is shorn, my self-appointed barber stands back and admires his work. Slowly, I lift my head and meet his glare. He folds his arms like the satisfied town butcher, and the crowd roars to life.
I feel overwhelmed, hunted. The faces around me mist and blur and the noise swells to a crescendo.
A pair of rough hands yanks me up and drags me along the street. The crowd parts and I am pushed onto the back of a lorry and dumped unceremoniously on a hard wooden bench.
I am staring at two other miserable young women, also bald, who are seated opposite me. One has tear-stained cheeks, but their faces are expressionless.
A drum beats steadily in the distance as if it is an omen. A man hurls himself onto the lorry and rips off my white blouse, holding it like a trophy. He throws my top and it flies into the crowds as if it is a billowing sheet, and a young man picks it up, waving the fine cotton garment above his head before bringing it down in front of his face and inhaling it as a connoisseur would sniff a vintage wine.
I wince and shudder as yet another pair of rough hands daub me with sticky black tar. Black streaks mark my cheeks, and a red swastika is painted on my forehead and my arm. I am branded, just like the victims the Nazis sent away to the camps.
I am shaking uncontrollably by the time a team of men on the ground sweep our fallen hair into a pile. I shudder at the smell of burning hair when they strike a match and stand around the pyre, gloating until our lost tendrils transform into exquisite purple and orange flames.
I turn my eyes away, but the acrid smell of something that is never supposed to burn hurts my nose and settles in the back of my throat.
The lorry rumbles into life. It is as if we are adulterous women accused of witchcraft from a time we thought had passed.
The French people who have been humiliated by the Nazis’ occupation of their country stand by and watch, their expressions hungry, as if doing to us what they could not do to the Nazi occupiers. Like air-raid sirens gone wrong, their catcalls sweep through the still afternoon air.
I cower in my seat.
These people have been oppressed and abused by a terrifying occupying regime, so now they have turned full circle and stolen their own women’s dignity, humanity, and truth.
Slowly, I lift my head to meet the beaten-down gaze of my fellow accused. Our jaded eyes flicker against each other’s. There is little hope. But as the truck begins to move through the square, and I sit here, stripped of everything, I realize there is one truth they cannot take away from me. There is one secret no one will ever know.
Nicole
CHAPTER ONE LONDON, PRESENT DAY
My phone pings in the queue at the supermarket. I forage about in my handbag. There is a message from my aunt Mariah and an image lights up the screen. And the message: Place Vendôme, Paris, 1944. Found this during my research into the family history. Astounded, obviously. But it explains everything. A young woman stares out at me in the photograph. Her head is shaved and even though the image of her is in black and white, I can tell the blood has drained from her lips. A Nazi swastika is branded on her forehead. My heart contracts as I peer at the photo until I realize that her features are more familiar and dearer to me than anyone else’s.
“No,” I murmur out loud.
Trolleys clatter, registers beep, and supermarket attendants wave people into the checkout zone.
I stand still as a telegraph pole.
Granny Louise. The girl in the photograph is my beloved grandmother.
I try to remember what she told me.
Granny only had a few faded photographs from after the war when she married my grandfather, standing on the front steps of a church, Granny smiling and smiling with her blond hair waved and pinned back from her face. She wore a white, drop-waist dress that trailed to the ground. There was a large satin bow on one hip and she held a bunch of bright white lilies so big they were almost falling out of her hands. I remember photos of her honeymoon in Cornwall, that deep-red lipstick they all favored back then, only visible in the black-and-white photographs as a deep stain. Then there were pictures taken by the sea when the bracing wind was blowing her hair, her Marilyn Monroe smile giving away nothing except joy.
People are staring at me, and I must move. I inch toward a cash register and scan my purchases, reach for my credit card, pay the grocery bill and, somehow, walk out the sliding glass doors. A still breeze blows bits of rubbish around the super‐ market car park. I unload my shopping, sliding my large brown paper bags into the boot of the Land Rover. It’s a sensible car, that we bought when we found out I was expecting a baby.
My hand floats to the tiny bump beneath my dress and I climb into the car, slide into the seat, do up my seatbelt, and swallow down the panic that writhes inside me like a basket of cut snakes.
Rain begins to patter on the windscreen. The memories come thick and fast. Granny reading to me until I fell asleep, sitting on the edge of the bed she kept for me in her spare room with her legs crossed at the ankles, her faded hair still waved like it used to be in the 1940s, and her blue eyes crinkled in concentration. We went through all the fairy tales, the 1930s adventure stories when children used to disappear into the countryside, munching on apples and chocolate and messing about on boats until sundown. Granny tucking me into bed until I was safe as a caterpillar in a cocoon. Granny’s breakfasts of toast and marmalade and the best hot chocolate in the world.
I force myself out of my reverie and back to the harsh reality of Aunt Mariah’s message.
As I drive home, the rain thickens and starts to fall in unusual patterns, blowing this way and that, and the houses in my street merge into a shimmering mirage. Everything takes on a glassy tone.
I turn into the driveway of our small, semidetached house in Abbey Wood with its yellow climbing roses cascading all over the façade, and I sit for one moment. Granny’s house in Sussex was covered with climbing roses, her garden was filled with herbs and vegetables and cottage plants and when I first laid eyes on this semidetached house, it was the roses that drew me in.
I pick up my phone and start typing a reply. Mariah, there must be a mistake. Granny would never have been complicit… as a… I cannot even bring myself to write the words. And then I do. Nazi collaborator.
Three dots appear on my screen. A few seconds later, nothing. I undo my seatbelt and frown. I know too well how women who had allegedly collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War were paraded around France on the back of trucks after the Allied liberation of the cities and towns. They were spat on, ostracized, and thrown into prison and tried.
The front door opens. Yellow, watery light streams out onto the veranda, followed by my husband, Andrew. He puts up a huge black umbrella, and soon we are lugging the shopping out of the car.
As I walk through the rain, tears start to fall down my cheeks. I plonk my shopping bags down on the wooden floor just inside the front door.
“Darling?” Andrew’s brow wrinkles, and he searches my face, his brown eyes serious, and his red hair sticking up in tufts, the way it always does when he has been out in the wind. I love
his unmanageable hair. “It’s the anniversary. It would get to anyone, sweetheart.”
I shake my head. Mariah has sent her message three days before the anniversary, the first anniversary of my mother’s death. The timing is clear. I lean into Andrew’s hug, resting my face against his shoulder, my forehead pressed against the soft‐ ness of his gray woolen jumper, the old one he favors when he is teaching science practicals to his younger students at the local comprehensive, because sometimes they make a bit of a mess. “It’s not just that,” I say. Reluctantly, I pull my head away from his shoulder and show him the picture on my phone.
“What is this?” he whispers. His head flicks up and his eyes lock with mine. “How on earth did your Aunt Mariah get hold of this? I don’t understand.”
“I have no idea.”
“You haven’t heard anything from Mariah recently? Other than this?” He holds the phone out in front of him.
“No. Nothing since…” The funeral. Mum’s funeral. Neither Mariah nor my cousins came. There was an excuse about not being able to get away from Paris, where Mariah moved not long after Granny’s death ten years ago. And #owers. Exquisite flowers from one of the best florists in London. Flowers that were far grander than the ones that trailed around Granny’s garden.
“She looks exactly like you.” He tucks a stray strand of my own blond hair behind my ear, and runs his hand down my wet cheek, wiping away my tears with his thumb.
I pause and brace myself. I had noticed that the picture of Granny in Paris looked very similar to me, but I almost had to swallow the thought down. It was too much to bear.
“Well,” I say, gathering myself and trying to muster some of Granny’s pluck, “something smells wonderful in the kitchen.” Homely scents fill the house. Roast lamb, rosemary, new potatoes. I pick the shopping bags up off the floor.
Andrew scratches his head. “I’m sorry. I’m dumbfounded. Why would Mariah send such a thing?”
