ESMÉ

Monday, July 2, 1928

4:32 p.m.

Esmé nearly escapes.

She’s just shoved her tweed-covered suitcase under the thick chain link and is about to duck under, grab the suitcase, and dash up the metal stairs. But the ship official—the man Esmé thinks of as a gendarme—appears three steps up. He glares down at Esmé, crosses his arms over the straining buttons of his blue uniform. Then he pulls out his baton, gripping it so hard in one hand that his knuckles go white and whacking it ever so slightly into the palm of the other.

Esmé quickly halts, with one foot under the chain, and her boots almost slide out from under her on the slick floor. Oh, why did she have to be spotted by this gendarme—the one who’d nearly caught her two days before, sneaking around outside of steerage?

She tries to turn around, but suddenly she’s shoved forward. The chain, waist-high for most adults, strikes petite nine-year-old Esmé Chambeau across her neck. She gasps, tries to push away from the chain. Her eyes water.

Even as her vision blurs, Esmé makes out that the gendarme is grinning at her predicament: either get trampled or escape the crowd by ducking under the chain, only for him to catch her. And then will she ever be let off the ship? Will he throw her in the ship’s gaol—as he’d screamed at her when he’d tried to chase her down? Or will she be sent back to France?

The crowd shouts questions at the smugly silent gendarme about when they will be able to disembark. Esmé is overwhelmed by their strident voices, by festering human smells churned over four days of choppy ocean crossing. Sparkles dance before her eyes. A sudden lurch of the SS Île de France sends the crowd tumbling forward. The chain cuts into Esmé’s neck.

For a horrible moment, her eyes bulge and her breath squeezes out of her windpipe.

The great ship shifts again, opening enough space for Esmé to move back from the chain, gasp for breath. But then her feet skid, and she falls backward. A man behind her curses, and the mucky bottom of the man’s boot descends toward her face. Esmé throws her arms over her face, squeezes her eyes shut. Hands grab her ankles. The gendarme, pulling her toward him. She kicks as hard as she can. He yelps but doesn’t let go.

And then, suddenly, someone grabs Esmé under her armpits, swoops her up.

Esmé opens her eyes. She’s in the arms of Monsieur Durand, who yells at the crowd to make space. She inhales deeply—such sweet relief, even this stale, sour air—but then cries out and points at the gendarme. He’s holstered his baton but holds up her suitcase, as if he means to bash it to the floor. His taunting look suggests that her suitcase is trash.

That she is trash.

She must retrieve the suitcase! She doesn’t care so much about the clothes, even the new ones that Mémère carefully made, though she could ill afford the new fancy silk and cotton and her hands are twisted with arthritis. But Esmé cannot lose her few relics of Papa: letters, and a cap he’d left behind from the U.S. Army.

Esmé again struggles to free herself, but Monsieur Durand is strong, large, and she barely moves at all. He glares at the gendarme with such bold fierceness that the crowd falls silent around them. And the gendarme hands over her suitcase to him.

As Monsieur Durand carries Esmé back through the crowd, she lets her head sink to his shoulder. For the first time since she left her home in Sainte-Menehould with Mémère and Father Bernard and Madame Blanchett to travel to Marseille to board this big boat, Esmé cries.

Back in the hold, now half-empty with the crowd by the stairs, Monsieur Durand carefully lowers her to the floor. He hands Esmé’s suitcase back to her. Then he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket and offers it to her with a gentle smile. Esmé wipes her nose. The handkerchief is surprisingly fresh, lavender scented. Soothing.

She holds the handkerchief up to him. “You can keep it,” Monsieur Durand says, amusement tinging his voice. “It’s the least I can do.”

Monsieur Durand and his three children—he is a widower, he’d explained—had been in the cots by Esmé and her chaperone. The youngest child, a baby girl, had been fussy the whole passage, but Esmé had taken over feeding the baby tinned milk and changing her diapers.

Esmé had helped Mémère, after all, tend to babies in the village when their mamas were sick. His older children were still too little to be of any help.

Now Monsieur Durand regards Esmé with concern. “Why did you run?”

Minutes before, when the SS Île de France shuddered and shook, Monsieur had reassured his children, as well as Esmé and her chaperone, that the ship was slowing to come into port.

Esmé had grabbed her suitcase, run from the hold, and wormed her way through the crowd already gathering before the stairs.

“I must see her,” Esmé says. “Lady Liberty.”

She’d been dreaming of le statue de la Liberté ever since Mémère had told her she must make this trip, had shown her a picture of the statue from an old war bond her American grandmère had sent to them.

Mémère had told her that the berobed lady with the strong arms, the uplifted flame, was a gift from France to America and would be waiting to welcome her.

Often during the crossing, Esmé had conjured an image of Lady Liberty whenever sadness heaved in her chest. And on the night she had briefly escaped from steerage to explore the rest of the ship—oh, the resplendent ballrooms and dining halls on the first cabin level, with their marble floors and velvet-and-mahogany furnishings and silver lighting fixtures—she found herself out on a deck. Even more grand than the elegant rooms, Esmé discovered, was the vast, blue-black ocean. She’d stared over the railing at the moonlight speckling and shimmering on the ocean surface and imagined Lady Liberty waiting for her on the dark horizon.

“Will you be all right?” Monsieur Durand asks. He casts a wary glance at the woman approaching them. She is tall, thin, with a long, hard face. Her dress is filthy and stained and, Esmé knows all too well from having to share a cot with her, smells of sickness. Her hair, which had embarked as an elegant swirled updo, will soon disembark as a messy crow’s nest. It had not been an easy crossing for Madame Blanchett, Esmé’s chaperone.

Even so, her expression now is fearsome, and she bears down upon Esmé and Monsieur Durand with thunderous purpose. For a moment, Esmé is tempted to beg Monsieur to take her wherever he is going, to plea that she could work as a caregiver for his children.

But she had promised Mémère that she would telegraph her when she was safely with her American grandmère.

“Oui,” Esmé finally answers. Then she realizes she has said nothing of what awaits her.

She blurts, “I am going to a place called Kinship. In Ohio.” What odd place-names, so different from those of the villages and provinces of her home. A pang of homesickness flashes over her. Would it be so bad, to be sent back to France? “To be with my grandmère. And her daughter.”

Mémère had told her that her aunt—Papa’s sister—is a sort of gendarme. A sheriff. This struck Esmé as odd—there are no lady gendarmes, at least not in her village of SainteMenehould.

As she thinks of the rough gendarme, doubt creeps into Esmé’s heart. What if this aunt of hers is mean like this gendarme? She frowns. “My papa’s family.”

Monsieur Durand tilts his head to the side, regarding Esmé with kindness and a little sadness. He gently pats her cheek. “Oh, cher enfant. If they are your papa’s family, then they are your family, too, non? You will be fine.”

He hurries to the back of the hold, barely nodding at Madame as they pass, eager to get back to his own children.

Suddenly Madame Blanchett is by her side. She puts down her suitcases, grabs Esmé’s arm, digs in her fingertips. Madame, a woman from the village who often bragged that her rich cousin in Saint Louis longed for her to visit, had been paid handsomely to accompany Esmé for the whole of the trip. Esmé pulls away, weary of being grabbed by adults.

Madame narrows her eyes on Esmé. “What were you thinking, idiote?” Her voice is like the odd hissing noises Esmé has heard on the ship from time to time. “I had to send Monsieur Durand after you, and watch after his snotty children!”

Well, she hadn’t done a good job watching after them, had she? She’d abandoned them.

Esmé’s mind churns with doubts about Madame. Will she abandon her, too? Mémère had said they’d cross in second cabin. But after they got on the ship, Esmé had seen Madame confer with someone—another passenger— and an exchange of tickets and money take place.

She suspects Madame sold their comfortable berth to a passenger who was unhappy at the ship being full except for steerage and pocketed the gain. While cleaning up after Madame on the trip or bringing her broth, Esmé had what Mémère and Father Bernard would call an uncharitable thought—that it served Madame right, for trying to profit off the tickets both of her grandmères had surely paid dearly for.

“Pick those up.” Madame points to her two suitcases.

Esmé stares at the three cases and looks around for Monsieur. Perhaps he could help?

But he is nowhere in sight, and people are shoving past them—it’s finally time to exit steerage. Sorrow rises in Esmé’s heart. Instinctively, she knows she will never see Monsieur or his children again. She has heard the mutterings, how America is a vast place, easy to get lost in.

Esmé forces a bright smile. “Madame, I am sorry to cause any trouble. I could make the rest of my way to . . .”— she hesitates, wanting to get the name of the place that will be her new home just right—“to Kinship, and you could go straight on to your cousin’s in Saint Louis.”

Madame’s face draws long with shock, eyebrows up and chin dropping into her stringy neck. Esmé waits for her expression to clear, for her to halfheartedly ask, Are you sure? and then to agree, and try to disguise her relief at being rid of Esmé and free to go on about her own way.

Instead, Madame’s eyes suddenly glint. “Oh no, ma chère.”

Esmé startles at her tone. For the first time on this trip, Esmé’s stomach nervously roils.

“I will make sure,” Madame says—then pauses to smile, another first for this trip— “to get you to your appointed destination.”

Esmé tucks her suitcase under one arm. Then she picks up both of Madame’s suitcases.

A half hour later, Madame and Esmé emerge onto the deck. It’s a bright, hot day, and the sunlight blanks Esmé’s vision. But once it clears, Esmé gazes around, desperate to see her.

And then she does—afar in the distance, on her own island. Lady Liberty.