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“Then I think I will allow you to live, niece.”
That makes one of us, aunt.
* * *
The next day the same guard who grabbed me by the hair takes me to the woman in the kitchen. “Mathilde, here’s your new serving girl,” he says.
Mathilde takes one disdainful glance my way and hands me a bottle. “Place one of these in each bowl.”
The pills are different from the ones I pilfered from the oatmeal, but that may be because they haven’t dissolved. I do everything she says, and when the other women come in, I hand the bowls out and clean up after them without being asked. It’s a long shot, but perhaps if I make her life and Iris’s life easy enough, they will start to trust me.
Mathilde sits comfortably, watching me, and when the women are pushed toward the common room, a guard comes for me. “This one stays,” she barks at him.
He shrugs and leaves us alone. “Finish up that washing,” she says, “and I’ll teach you how to make stew.”
9
HENRI
It’s February when it happens. I’m sitting at the table alone with a bottle of whiskey, no glass, when I hear the crash upstairs.
I’m just sober enough to know I’m not imagining things.
I run and arrive in Marie’s room only to stumble to a halt. For a moment, my sister is a stranger to me. Covered head to toe in dirt, her hair matted. I take two steps toward her and she collapses against me like a small child, weeping. I want to weep myself. I really thought I’d lost her.
“It’s okay,” I whisper. “It’s okay. You’re safe. But where is Amelie?”
“I left her behind,” she cries, and I feel my stomach drop. No, I think, this can’t be right. If Marie is still alive and was able to get out, Sarah can still get out too.
“It was all for nothing,” she whispers, as I help her to the bed. “There were no older women there. Our mother was probably dead the day she arrived. They drugged us and Amelie…she forced me not to eat the food. When I wouldn’t listen, she—” Marie’s head drops and she begins to weep. “She pushed my gruel into my lap, I think, and they beat her.”
“So where is she now?” I demand. “Why isn’t she with you?”
Marie’s eyes shut and she begins to tell me a story so horrible it hardly seems possible— hiding with corpses, how one of them had to remain behind when the guards came too early. “I should have made her go in my place,” Marie weeps. “It was the last night to get out.”
It’s not the time for blame. It’s not the time to say you forced her to risk her life to go there and then she risked it again to get you out. But I’m thinking it. My God, I’m thinking it.
I bury my head in my hands. “What do you mean it was the last night to get out?”
“Amelie showed me the hole they were digging. To bury the rest of the dead. She said it was our last chance to escape.”
I hear the finality of those words, and my brain seems to empty, go numb, before I shake my head. “No,” I tell her. “No. She isn’t dead. She’d find another way.”
Tears run down her face. “I need the laudanum,” she says. “I can’t face this without the laudanum.”
I shake my head. “Marie, no. Whatever they had you on, you’ve got to break clean of it. I need you to focus so you can show me where you were held.”
She slides to the floor and curls into a ball, weeping and inconsolable. “She won’t be there.”
“You don’t know that!” I argue. “You were the one who was so convinced our mother was trapped somewhere!”
She looks up. “Everyone was dying, Henri. That drug made us sick, something else was making us sick too. There’s no chance someone survived in there twenty years. None.”
I feel the pulse of terror in my chest and push it away. She is wrong. She has to be. “I still need to see, for myself. Please, Marie.”
She presses the base of her palms to her eyes. “Give me the laudanum,” she finally says. “Give me one, and I’ll show you where we were held.”
* * *
