The garden of lost secre.., p.1
The Garden of Lost Secrets, page 1
This book is a work of historical fiction. In order to give a sense of the times, some names or real people or places have been included in the book. However, the events depicted in this book are imaginary, and the names of nonhistorical persons or events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of such nonhistorical persons or events to actual ones is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Kelly Bowen
Reading group guide copyright © 2023 by Kelly Bowen and Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Cover copyright © 2023 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bowen, Kelly (Romance fiction writer), author.
Title: The garden of lost secrets / Kelly Bowen.
Description: First edition. | New York : Forever, 2023. | Includes
bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022057892 | ISBN 9781538722145 (trade paperback) |
ISBN 9781538722169 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939-1945--Fiction. | LCGFT: Historical fiction. |
Novels.
Classification: LCC PR9199.4.B68523 G37 2023 | DDC 813/.6--dc23/eng/
20221213
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022057892
ISBNs: 978-1-5387-2214-5 (trade paperback), 978-1-5387-2216-9 (ebook)
E3-20230215-DA-NF-ORI
“Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person’s character lies in their own hands.”
—Anne Frank
To my mom and dad, who offered wisdom and
unconditional support down each path I chose, but more
importantly, held me accountable for each one of those
choices. For that, I will always be grateful.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Acknowledgements
Discover More
Reading Group Guide Author’s Note
Discussion Questions
Historical Note
Further Reading
About the Author
Also by Kelly Bowen
Chapter
1
Stasia
8 June 1935
Rouen, France
The dead man had no boots.
It was the sight of his bare, filthy toes pointed up into the shadows of the narrow alley that made Stasia Neimic stop where she was, her hand frozen on the bars of her bicycle. She had seen dead people before, of course, but those had been as cherished in death as they had been in life and treated accordingly. This man was not cherished. He had been discarded, and Stasia found that realization unbearably sad.
The man had died propped up crookedly against a crumbling brick wall, surrounded by refuse and broken glass. It was difficult to tell how old he was, but the grey in his matted beard and stringy hair suggested that he had been at least her father’s age. He was dressed in the remnants of a soldier’s uniform from two decades ago, the blue greatcoat almost unrecognizable as anything beyond a buttonless, dull grey tatter.
A knot of pedestrians, their arms laden with baskets and bags from the market, hurried by Stasia, their steps quickening even farther past the mouth of the alley as they either deliberately ignored the dead man or simply chose not to see. Stasia opened her mouth to call after them but then closed it, not sure what she would say. What she would ask for. The dead were beyond anybody’s help. But she couldn’t just walk away.
Stasia left her bicycle at the top of the narrow lane and picked her way to the body, ignoring the stench of rotting garbage and urine. She crouched down, taking in the claw-like fingers that, even in death, still clutched the neck of a bottle of gin. The ravages of the contents of that bottle, and undoubtably hundreds before it, were written across his sunken and gaunt face, pale and still beneath the beard.
She should at least cover him with something. His coat, perhaps, until she could find someone to collect him. Or maybe there was something in the alley that she could use to—
“Back away. Don’t touch him.”
The order was snarled, and Stasia shot to her feet, stumbling back.
A boy who couldn’t have been much older than Stasia’s fifteen years shouldered past her and replaced her in a crouch in front of the body. He was tall and lean, wiry muscle cording his forearms, where his threadbare shirt was pushed up over his elbows. His hair was pale blond and cut very short, his face an arrangement of bitter angles and angry planes.
“Did you touch him?” Cold grey eyes pinned her where she stood.
Stasia found her tongue. “No, I was just—”
“Did you take anything?”
Stasia stared at the boy. “I was going to cover him. You think I would steal something from a dead man?”
He looked away from her and was now rummaging in a worn satchel he had slung across his body. He had pulled out a small paper-wrapped bundle. “He’s not dead,” he mumbled.
“What?”
The boy placed the bundle in the man’s lap and reached for the empty bottle clasped in his lifeless hand. “He’s not—”
The man that Stasia had believed dead jerked to life, his eyes snapping open in blind panic, his mouth open in a soundless scream. The arm that held the gin bottle swung wildly, the bottle catching the boy on the side of the head with a hollow thud before shattering. The boy crumpled to the side, and the man in the coat lurched to his feet, only to stagger two steps to the side and collapse again.
Stasia remained frozen where she was for a heartbeat, her breath caught in her throat, too startled to react. The man was now curled in a ball on the ground, his hands over his head, whimpering. The boy had managed to push himself to his hands and knees, a deep gash above his left eye bleeding copiously and leaving bright, scarlet inkblots on the collar and shoulder of his shirt in the dramatic way that scalp lacerations are prone to do. His eyes were squeezed shut, his hands clenched into fists, and he was muttering curses under his breath.
Stasia ignored the man and went to the boy first. “Look at me.”
The boy put a hand to his temple and opened his eyes to inspect his bloody fingers as he drew them away. “Shit,” he groaned.
She put a hand on his shoulder. “Look at me,” she said again in the voice that her grandfather always used when dealing with difficult patients. Direct, firm, but not harsh.
The boy looked up. His eyes were clear and furious as he met her gaze directly. “Don’t touch me,” he snapped, wrenching away from her.
Satisfied that his faculties seemed to be in order, Stasia stood and retreated, eyeing the gash above his eye. “You’re going to need that stitched,” she told him. And that was the truth. She’d stitched less grievous wounds on her grandparents’ ornery gelding.
He ignored her and slowly pushed himself to his feet, pressing the sleeve of his shirt to his wound.
“Did you hear me? You’re going to need that st—”
“I don’t need anything, certainly not from you. This is your fault.”
“I was just trying to help—”
“I don’t need any more of your help,” he spat. “You’ve done more than enough.” He pulled his shirt sleeve away and grimaced at the bloodstain. “Shit,” he muttered again.
Stasia turned her attention to the man still curled on the ground. Very slowly, she crouched beside him, speaking softly to him the way she might with a terrified child. Gently, she took the broken neck of the bottle from his fingers and set it aside before he could do any more damage, to himse
“Can you sit up?” she asked the man in the same voice she had used with the boy.
At the sound of her voice, the man stopped whimpering and dragged himself up and away from her. He was trembling, and he clutched his hands over his ears. “I can hear them,” he mumbled. “Always hear them. Always, always. They’re comin’ back. The planes.”
“There are no planes,” Stasia told him.
“I told you not to touch him.” The boy was back, pushing his body between them. He turned, forcing her back another step. “Go away and leave us alone.”
Stasia shook her head, confused at the boy’s reaction. She had expected anger directed toward the man who had struck him. At the very least, she might have expected the boy to disappear, but instead he stayed, ignoring his injury and putting himself between the man and Stasia as though she was the threat. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Leave.” The word was desperate, and it made her pause.
And then retreat.
Stasia stopped where she had left her bicycle but went no farther. She would respect his wishes for the moment but she was not abandoning him. Not until she could assure herself that he was all right. And that he would have his wound tended. Because he hadn’t been entirely wrong when he had said that it was her fault.
She watched as the boy helped the man sit back up against the wall, speaking to him in low tones. Seemingly oblivious to the blood that was still sheeting the side of his face, the boy cast about for the paper bundle that had rolled away in the scuffle. Finding it, he unwrapped it and pressed it into the man’s hands, his voice rising in argument when the man batted it away. It looked like a piece of cake, Stasia thought. Or maybe part of a loaf, though it was hard to tell from where she stood.
She bit her lip. This man hadn’t been discarded after all. She wasn’t sure what or who he was to the boy, and she wasn’t sure of the circumstances that had brought him to this time and this place, but he still had someone who cared, despite his actions. Somehow, this knowledge made her even sadder.
The exchange went on for a while, the conversation or argument rising and falling in volume, the boy’s shoulders slumping and straightening with it. Eventually, he stood and threw up his hands. The man on the ground shouted something unintelligible at him and twisted his face away, his body slouching even farther down the wall. The boy turned, his expression blank, his posture rigid, his eyes firmly on the ground. He stalked toward Stasia, stopping only when he became aware of her presence. The bleeding above his eye had slowed but the skin was already starting to purple and swell.
“Couldn’t help yourself, could you?” he sneered. “Had to stay for the show?”
Stasia blinked. “I don’t understand—”
“I told you to leave us alone.”
“You need to have that cut tended.”
The boy made a rude noise and continued walking. She let him get ahead of her before pulling her bicycle from the wall, pushing it as she followed him at a distance. He was headed west, away from the shops and cafés, across Boulevard des Belges, toward the Hôtel-Dieu. Good. Someone at the hospital would tend to his laceration.
Except he didn’t seem to be heading to the hospital to find a doctor. Instead, he hurried past the gates of the hospital, head down, wiping at the blood on the side of his face with the sleeve of his shirt again. Two women, dressed smartly in summer frocks and heels, deliberately veered away across the cobbled pavement to avoid him, both tucking their handbags more securely beneath their arms, though if he noticed, he gave no indication. Stasia frowned in disbelief, feeling resentful toward the women for their callousness. Surely they had to see that he was injured? Surely someone cared?
The boy turned and continued down the northwest side of the hospital, pausing only when he reached a pair of battered, utilitarian doors set into the long building. Outside these doors, gathered against the building’s stone walls, were stacks of discarded detritus that looked like broken equipment, and it was through this abandoned collection that the boy seemed to be searching for something. From across the street, Stasia watched with bewilderment as he pulled a length of wire from the top of a tangled mess, wound it neatly, and slid it into his bag.
From another pile, he picked an assortment of small parts and pieces, most of which Stasia couldn’t identify, and all of which vanished into his satchel with the same practiced efficiency. When he reached the last stack, he paused before he extracted a small tin wedged between the pile and the building. He tipped it over in his hands and grinned, though it almost immediately turned into a grimace as he touched the side of his face.
One of the doors banged open without warning, and the boy whirled, nimbly jumping to the side. A portly man stumbled out, yelling and waving his fist. Stasia couldn’t hear what he was saying but his fury was obvious and clearly aimed at the bleeding boy, who now had his bag tucked firmly at his side as he sprinted away from the lane. Without looking back, the boy darted behind a news seller and his stacks of papers and then bolted around him, easily outpacing the puffing hospital employee who was attempting to give chase.
Stasia mounted her bicycle and continued to follow him until he finally slowed and, free from any pursuit, started walking south along the lazy curve of the Seine. For a fleeting moment, she wondered if she should simply leave him be. He’d made it more than clear that her help and her presence were not welcome. In the next moment, she knew that she could not—would not—abandon him. He was hurt, partly due to her actions, and he was even heading in the same direction as her grandparents’ farm. Satisfied she had given herself all the justification she needed, Stasia angled her bicycle toward the road.
It wasn’t hard to follow him, though she was glad for the bicycle because she didn’t think she would have been able to keep up with his long-legged strides otherwise. She drew even with him past the port, where to her left, the river’s surface sparkled like diamonds under the bright June sunshine. As he left the city behind, his steps made little puffs of dust that rose and scattered in the breeze, giving a faint chalky scent to the air that was already heavily laced with the pungency of the thick, earthy vegetation lining the river’s edge. Stasia slowed enough to keep pace with him, waiting for him to acknowledge her presence.
He didn’t.
Up close, Stasia could see that the wound was bleeding again. The swelling was worse, enough so that she doubted he was able to see much out of his eye any longer. Dried blood had crusted in his pale hair and above his ear. If the wound pained him, he didn’t show it, but Stasia knew it had to be throbbing with every step he took.
“You really need stitches,” she finally said.
The boy said nothing, merely increasing his pace.
“It wouldn’t take long,” Stasia tried. “And it will heal faster.”
“Go away.” He kicked at a rock in the road. “Leave me alone.”
“No,” she replied pleasantly.
“You’re just going to follow me then?” He still hadn’t looked at her.
“Yes. Until you agree to have your wound tended.”
A humourless bark of laughter escaped. “Tended by whom? You?”
“Yes.”
That seemed to get his attention. He turned his icy grey eyes on her, though the effect was rather tarnished by the fact that one of those eyes was almost completely swollen shut. “Right. Because you’re a doctor.” It was a statement loaded with mocking incredulity.
Stasia was used to that. “Not yet.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means my mother died of polio when I was six. And as soon as I am old enough to attend university, I will apply to the faculty of medicine and become a doctor and figure out how to keep anyone else’s mother or sister or father or son from dying of the same.”
His mouth snapped shut, and he looked away from her.
Stasia was used to that response too. Over the years, she had learned that it was better to tell people things like that up front. They always wondered anyway, and at the very least, it prevented the predictable array of snide comments about her ambitions that she would have received otherwise.
“In the meantime, I have learned some basic skills. Stitching cuts that would otherwise leave nasty scars being one of them.” She steered her bicycle around a divot in the road, trying to keep the wrapped packages in the basket balanced.
