Page 48 of The World That We Knew

People said love was the antidote to hate, that it could mend what was most broken, and give hope in the most hopeless of times. That time was now. They had watched the captain enough to know that on Friday nights he went to the café in town to look for women and girls. This was why fathers hid their daughters and wives, why women no longer walked through the streets. But Ettie would be waiting for him. She would be wearing the red shoes.

She thought over her situation, and by the following day she’d come to a decision. She had never been with a man, and if things went wrong, she didn’t wish the captain to be the first man who touched her. She went to Dr. Girard’s study, where he was reading a book and having a glass of wine, doing his best not to think about the past, the same routine he had every night, disrupted only by chess games with Ettie. When he saw Ettie, he assumed she had come for a game, but she was barefoot and her expression was troubled. He knew her mission with Victor was approaching, and he wondered if she was backing out.

“Have you come for chess?” he asked.

In her old life, Ettie would not have been allowed to be alone in the same room with a man who was not a member of her family, but now she went to him, and because it was so difficult to ask for what she wanted, she came to sit on his lap. He was startled and confused by her unexpected action.

“There, there,” he said as if she were a girl, perhaps one of his patients who feared being ill. “You’re not getting frightened, are you? You have to be sure, Ettie. If this isn’t for you, speak up now before you endanger yourself and the others.”

“That isn’t the problem. I want to be with you before I go,” she told the doctor.

The doctor drew her off his lap, depositing her on the chair across from him. He was flattered, but not interested. He had not been with a woman since Sarah’s death, and he didn’t intend to be with one again. “Let’s play chess instead,” he suggested patiently, as if speaking to a child.

Ettie stood up and unbuttoned her dress. It was an ill-fitting frock, unlike any of the clothes in his wife’s closet. Girard thought perhaps it had belonged to the housekeeper.

Ettie could only coax him by telling him the truth. “The first one can’t be him,” she explained.

Dr. Girard shook his head. “It’s wrong.”

“No it isn’t,” Ettie insisted. “It has to be you. I trust you.”

He poured them both a glass of wine, then took the chessboard and placed it on the table between them. “Whoever wins decides.”

He assumed there was no chance of his losing, but she was better than he thought, and, he supposed, he had been a good teacher. Ettie was a smart girl, smart enough to win.

They went upstairs, not to his room—he could not have taken her to the bed he had shared with his wife—but to a guest chamber where friends from Paris had often stayed in the time when people could travel freely. Many of their past visitors were already dead. No friends had visited for many years. Now the only guests he had stayed in the barn.

Ettie removed her dress and undergarments and folded them onto a chair, then slipped into bed. The doctor hesitated, watching her with concern. He noticed the scar on her arm in the shape of a letter.

“It’s in memory of my sister,” Ettie said when she caught him staring.

Girard thought this might be madness, for the two of them to be in this bedroom together; surely it was unethical. But when she motioned to him to join her, she looked fragile, and he didn’t know which would wound her more, responding to her suggestion or turning away. He took off his jacket and folded it onto a chair, then undressed and sat on the edge of the bed. He ran his hand over her hair.

“Don’t treat me as if I were your patient,” Ettie scolded, taking offense. She leaned up to kiss him, and he kissed her in return. “That’s better,” she said.

He folded himself into bed with her, and they both forgot who they were and what had brought them together. But Ettie didn’t forget that he was a kind, decent man, and he didn’t forget she was a girl of twenty who might not live to be twenty-one. Because of this what transpired between them was something they hadn’t expected, it was almost as if they had fallen in love in a world where anything could happen and nothing was impossible.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

BEEHIVE HOUSE

HAUTE-LOIRE, JULY 1944

MARIANNE CAME FROM THE BORDER with brambles threaded through her hair. It was hot, with the white sun beating down on the hillsides. She was exhausted and looking forward to sleeping in her own bed after weeks in the woods. More children than ever were being taken over the border. Everyone knew the war would soon be ending, still there would be chaos for some time. Economies had been ruined; neighbors had turned against neighbors. The Royal Air Force had already dropped tons of bombs on Berlin. In June, Allied forces heavily bombed targets in France, invading Normandy on June sixth. Most of the Nazi efforts were now on the Russian front, and German soldiers in France were taking the opportunity to run away, doing their best to escape before their defeat. Local people often saw them in the woods, lost and panicked, willing to shoot anyone who came near. There were still German soldiers who did their best to find the last of the hidden Jews or members of the Resistance as they fled. They left bodies on doorsteps in the villages they passed through and mass graves in the woods. Every now and then a crow would soar past with a gold ring or coat button in its beak, a shiny souvenir of murder.

Marianne was thinking of Victor, as she so often did. She had to stop herself, or she would think of nothing else. She’d taken three young children across a few nights earlier, along with a woman of twenty, who was without any family or friends and still wept for her mother and father at night. Crossings were a bit easier in some sections, for the Italian guards at the border often looked the other way throughout the war; they were far from home, and many had no idea what they were fighting for. When they shot at fleeing figures, they had often shot into the air. The Nazis had recently withdrawn from Sicily, and Italy would surrender to the Allies in September.

She remembered every child she had brought across, not their names, which were often false anyway, but their faces. They would cross the Wolf’s Plain in the dark, holding hands, shivering no matter the weather. She always told them they were not to stop for any reason. Even if their hands stung and bled when they climbed over the barbed wire, even if a shot was fired. Think of a cup of hot chocolate waiting for you, she would tell them. And a very warm soft bed. Think of dinner on the table, and new shoes. Think forward, not back.

She did her best to think forward as well. She was convinced that what had happened between herself and Victor was meant to be, and everything she had ever done had led her to him. But who could depend on fate? She had loved him while she worked in his parents’ house, first as a sister or friend might, and then in the months before she’d left as something much more. It had happened slowly, and then, shockingly, she knew she had fallen in love with him. Perhaps that was part of the reason she’d gone without any goodbyes. Back then, Victor was nearly eighteen and she was twenty-three and the five years that separated them was not so much. Although lately, when she looked in a mirror, she saw that she looked older than her age; she was weathered, her skin damaged from so much time spent outside, especially in winter. Not that it mattered. She paid little attention to her looks, simply braiding her hair or piling it atop her head to keep it out of the way. She had never worn lipstick or mascara or high heels, though in Paris she had sometimes envied the women who did, but it was not in her nature to do so. She had been born plain and had remained that way. Yet Victor had told her she was the most beautiful woman in the world. She had laughed, but she saw in his eyes that he believed this, and later, when they were apart, she’d wept, grateful to know he thought so.

Her father, a traditional, old-fashioned man, would not have been happy to know she slept with Victor here in his house, and that she did so with fierce abandon, even though they were unmarried. There was never enough time. She could count how often they had been together, twelve times, that was all. But twelve occasions could be a world.

It was strange to be at Beehive House now that her father was gone, and even stranger when she was here with Victor, and stranger still to be so happy whenever she was with him. In this terrible time they had managed to find joy. They had made a pact that each would live life without fearing for the other while they were in the Resistance; each had their work to do, and that meant being away from the farm and one another. Yet secretly Marianne worried. Victor was young and brash and fearless, an unpredictable combination.

Still, she would never tell him how to live his life. She hadn’t when he was a boy, and she wasn’t about to do so now. What they both did was dangerous, but living was dangerous. Her father had been at his own farm, taking care of his bees, breathing in the blue air, when they’d come to murder him. All Marianne could do was live her life, and let Victor live his.

She took note that in her absence, the flowers in the wreath she had left on her father’s grave had dried into husks that had blown away in the wind. She decided she would spend the following day working on a new one. The fields were rife with clouds of Queen Anne’s lace, which would make a billowy wreath. Her father had always said there were people who saw Queen Anne’s lace as a weed, and those who considered it a flower, and he belonged to the latter group.