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Elodie half sobbed, half laughed again, then dashed away a tear. ‘Is it better? I hope so, they’re all so wonderful, and I feel like maybe I could deserve their kindness, their support if I was just simply… sad. Sometimes, I can’t sleep because the rage consumes me, making me envision hurting that man who took Jacques from me, torturing him.’
To her surprise Sister Augustine nodded. ‘Grief isn’t just despair, cherie, it’s this too, the anger we feel, it’s a part of the process. Trust me, it’s natural to question one’s faith at such times…’
‘It’s not that, it’s not God I’m angry with, perhaps I should be… for what he allowed… but I feel my rage directed at the man who got away with killing Jacques, Otto Busch. Sometimes I wish Freddie had never told me his name. It feels seared into my skull. This name for this faceless person that I wouldn’t be able to spot in the street even if my life depended on it, who stole Jacques from me, stole the father from my unborn child, and changed Monsieur Blanchet into a shadow of himself.’
It was at that point she began to sob.
‘He will be all right, Monsieur Blanchet, already he seems a bit better to me.’
‘Does he?’ Elodie was doubtful. ‘It’s like he’s wasting away. He’s half his size, rarely if ever comes around, not since the memorial.’ Elodie closed her eyes. ‘It’s that that probably hurts the most – that I couldn’t bring Jacques home, I couldn’t have a funeral, just a memorial,’ she said, as hot tears slipped down her cheeks.
Sister Augustine had attended the service, so she was well aware.
‘It torments me that no one said his last rites,’ sobbed Elodie. ‘I keep thinking that his soul can’t be at rest.’
Sister Augustine shook her head. ‘No, child, don’t think of it like that. You don’t know that. I’m sure his friends would have said something. He was buried by friends – good friends, loyal ones who cared deeply for him, so much so that they helped to protect him and disguise his nationality, and they chose to bury him on one of his favourite parts of the island, correct?’
Tears were leaking down Elodie’s face. She hadn’t thought of it that way. She nodded. She had told the nun what Freddie had told her about Jacques’ death and burial on the island, but she hadn’t thought of it the way Sister Augustine was now inviting her to – that he was buried with love. It helped more than she could say to think of that.
Sister Augustine continued. ‘I have never believed as some do that without a clergy present one’s soul is in limbo – that may be blasphemous but it is what I think. Before we had churches, there was God, he is in all things. He would not abandon Jacques, never fear that. Perhaps, someday, you can see his grave and have his rites performed then, if that would help you.’
Elodie stared at the nun, whose words offered a small glimmer of solace, like daylight through a crack in a window. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Maybe after the baby is born, when things settle down in Germany, perhaps.’
Little by little Elodie began to put her life back together, as Grand-mère had advised her back when she’d suffered her first miscarriage. Every day she set herself one goal: to make a new dish at the restaurant or to visit the river again. To tend Jacques’ mother’s meadow. To get out and to see Sister Augustine.
All of these helped and when the lavender bloomed in the second week of June, while she was visiting her friend, she went into labour.
‘Ma cherie,’ cried Sister Augustine as Elodie clutched her stomach, bent over in pain. ‘Is it the baby?’
‘Yes,’ panted Elodie, recognising the pains from her miscarriages; this time, though, she hoped and prayed on all the heavens above to bear a living child. ‘Fetch someone!’ she cried.
Sister Augustine rushed inside the abbey and returned shortly with another nun. She was tall, with thick, straight black brows and sharp features.
‘Sister Grace has helped to deliver many children,’ said Sister Augustine.
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ said Elodie as the nun reached out to take her hand.
‘Let’s meet this child then,’ she said.
Elodie nodded, gratefully, taking her hand, and smiling through a shimmer of tears before another contraction ripped through her and she bent over again and cried out.
‘Come on, let’s get you inside,’ said Sister Grace and the nuns helped her to walk into a courtyard and then to another building, where they staggered down a corridor, with Elodie’s face contorted with pain, and finally into an empty cell that had a single cot and a painting of Mary with the baby Jesus on the wall opposite. Two other nuns were there already, their arms filled with linen and towels.
She was helped carefully onto the bed, once the pain subsided momentarily.
The sister began to examine her, helping to remove her undergarments, timing the moments for when the pain did not rip through her.
‘It won’t be long now,’ she said. ‘Perhaps another hour or two.’
‘Two more hours,’ cried Elodie. ‘I can’t do this for two more hours!’
‘You can. It might be quicker, though.’
It wasn’t. It took four. Marguerite Blanchet came slithering into the world, fists balling, face screwed up in rage as she howled, calming only when she was wrapped up and placed in Elodie’s arms.
Elodie, who was half delirious with pain and fatigue, stared at her daughter in wonder, seeing Jacques’ face looking up at her in miniature.
Sister Augustine came to sit by her side, bringing her a glass of water, and leaning forward to stroke the soft skin of the baby’s cheek. ‘We like to use the word miracle a lot in our line of work,’ she said with a grin, nodding at the painting on the wall opposite of the virgin mother, then softly touching the baby’s head. ‘But this definitely feels like one.’
