It was reluctant praise. Helene must have been a saint, for I did not think that Lenore handed out compliments generously.
“The girls worked with Jerome in the orchard, and he supported them. He did not listen to me anymore when I made suggestions. He listened to the girls.”
I pictured the older man from the photographs running the orchard on his own. It must have been a godsend to finally have some help, which he had not been able to get from his sister. Though I did not voice these thoughts.
But she had not yet given me reason enough to think they were in some way bad.
“You said he would have lived if not for Mariette. What did you mean by that?”
She pinched her lips and blinked a few times. She was struggling with the answer, and I knew then that it was far more personal. I saw it all in the things she didn’t say, the rushed glances that she gave me, that she was jealous of them. Jerome, who had returned from war to then lose his wife and son, who had lived alone with his sister on an orchard as the years passed him by. And then perhaps discovered a purpose again with the arrival of two small girls he could take care of.
“I believe that he would have sold the property and moved to Rouen long before the war arrived. But in the end he signed up to volunteer and got himself shelled to pieces. All I was left with were several photographs and a box of useless items he sent me before he left for the front.”
“And what about the girls?”
“I heard from someone that they had left. I also heard there was trouble out there, some commotion, some trading of secrets with the Germans. And it didn’t surprise me. Nothing about Mariette surprised me, and Helene was just as complicit. But I suspected that whatever bad came would have been Mariette’s own doing. I did not hear of her other than that. Missing, perhaps killed, I even thought. I have little to tell you other than Mariette was wild always. Jerome brought them up and treated them as if they were his daughters, but I did not think it was right. They were not our kind. They were trouble.”
It was vexing why the word “trouble” had come up several times. The shelling of the beautiful towns nearby and the fact that they were unwittingly living on the front line was the only scandal I could make sense of at that point. But my spirits were still dampened with each piece of news about Mariette. I had to believe she wasn’t everything that Lenore described, that there was something more I wasn’t told. I believed that to hear Jerome’s word on it would have changed everything.
“Do you have any idea where the girls might have gone to? Were there any other family, contacts?”
“Gypsies. What does anyone really know about them? Even the girls couldn’t tell Jerome anything when he questioned them about their past.”
“They were very young, is that right?”
She shrugged and looked at me sideways, interpreting my question as combative, which of course it was. I had to wonder why, for someone reluctant to discuss Mariette and Helene in the first instance, she seemed keen to disclose every negative thought she had about the girls.
“It appears that they at least helped on the farm.”
“They worked in the orchard. Helene was steady, and Mariette was a fast learner.”
Finally, something positive about Mariette that she found dreadfully hard to say, though I could tell she felt guilty that perhaps she could not have been more help on the orchard herself.
We had reached the end of the conversation, and I struggled to find more questions. I looked around the room, saw the curtains that had not been changed for years, the cupboards wearing, the floorboards scratched and unpolished, and her aging body. Selling the orchard early might have given her some money, I realized, and felt some remorse for her situation.
I thanked her for the tea and was about to stand to leave, then wondered about the box she spoke of.
“Is there anything in the box of Jerome’s that might give me some indication of Mariette’s whereabouts?”
“I don’t think so, Monsieur Watts.”
“I can give you some money,” I said, “for your trouble.”
She frowned, though her expression was less aggrieved, her mouth not pulled so taut. She left the room, then returned with a small wooden box with a hinged lid and placed it on the table between us.
“I have taken what I wanted, portraits and letters that he wrote to his wife. There is nothing you can glean from them. They were written long before the girls arrived. But you can look at what’s left.”
I sorted through carefully, aware and sensitive that these were items that belonged to her dead brother.
There were various trinkets, a tiny pair of leather gloves, a box of bullets, a tortoiseshell snuffbox, a pipe: things that mean nothing but to the people who owned them. There were several other items, and then something caught my eye. I picked up the two small discs, one green and the other red. Inscribed on these were E. S. Watts, a service number, and the religion C of E. I took a moment longer to stare curiously at Edgar’s identity tags, my head filled with images to suggest what this meant. When a body is found, the red disc is taken and the other one left with the soldier. It could be that, miraculously, these tags survived the battle that my brother did not. But with all the other evidence, especially with no body yet found, this was the clearest sign that he may have walked away from the battlefield.
“What is so interesting?” she asked.
“These belonged to my brother. May I take them?”
She hesitated, and I took several francs from my wallet and placed them between us.
“They are not mine,” she said without looking at the money, though very much aware of how much I had left there, and more than she likely expected. “I don’t see a need to keep them.”
I thanked her, and she watched me walk away. I doubted I would see her again and felt much pity, as one does for someone who has lived their life in misery and is unable to see all the good around them. From her window, she watched me leave, and I wondered if she would notice I had taken the photograph of the two girls also. She had no need of that, either.
My last hope was to visit the priest in the small village, whose address Roland had given me.
CHAPTER 18
I found the chapel was a beautiful and dark medieval masterpiece in stone between tiers of barren poplars. Inside was a high arched ceiling and heavy crossbeams, which matched the rich ochre of the narrow pews, and fragranced with wood polish and incense. The elderly priest was at a desk in his office at the back of the church. He was a tall, thin, bespectacled man who was more receptive than the previous interviewee. I explained myself briefly, told him about Edgar, and he offered condolences. He said he had visited Bailleul and other places toward the end. He invited me to sit with him. I pulled out the certificate carefully folded in Edgar’s book of thoughts.
He examined the certificate, his nose close to the page.
“Yes, that is certainly my signature,” he said. “And this has something to do with the lawyer who contacted me?”
“Yes.”
“I remember more clearly now that I see this and the names in front of me.” He frowned a bit at this point and peered at the faces of Edgar, Mariette, and Jerome that I passed him. “Yes, yes, the girl I can remember something, but the man, the groom, he is a bit more vague.”
“He had blue eyes and brown hair, something the photograph doesn’t show.”
He closed his eyes, frowning slightly. He was thinking very deeply.
“I don’t remember specifically, and the picture does not show his face all that clearly. I vaguely recall . . . the groom’s hands, I remember, were shaking. Nerves about the marriage perhaps.” He smiled at me, lighthearted, before again peering close to the photo. “The father of the girl, however, I do remember very well from this photo, a very gentlemanly, quiet man with hands that worked hard. He did all the talking, and I presumed at the time because the groom did not speak any French. Owing to the terrible state of things and not knowing where our country was headed,
I overlooked the fact that they had lost their identities in the bombings.” Edgar in fact spoke the priest’s language very well.
“I do remember that I liked the older man immediately,” said the priest. “He was most gracious, though he was insistent that the marriage happen as quickly as possible, and he seemed a little downcast. There was no cause for banns of course. It was not the church I took guidance from here. There was the baby to think of.”
I felt my heart quicken. “Was she pregnant?”
“No,” he said gently, without any necessary explanation. That single word had confirmed what Dr. Macklin had suspected from the beginning.
“But the groom . . . ,” he continued. “I’m sorry, I don’t recognize him. It is difficult. There were several weddings and many since, I might add. He is familiar, but the girl I can tell is the same as I remember, if that helps you.”
“Do you know where they might have gone from here?”
He thought hard.
“There was something . . . Yes, I think it was this couple. The father asked questions about shipping lines from the south . . . I imagine to get as far away from the north as possible.”
“You mean a ship to England?”
He shrugged.
“Perhaps. I have never traveled abroad, but I had a brother who had left once from Le Havre.”
“And you think that’s where they were heading?”
He shook his head. “I can’t say. I’m hoping I have remembered the right people at least, that I haven’t just confused you further. And I wish I could tell you more that would bring some peace about your brother.” He paused, then put his fingers to his chin reflectively. “But if I may be so bold, and in view of the fact that your brother is recorded as dying in action, the person on the certificate is someone perhaps with the same name.”
I was beginning to feel a little disheartened, especially in light of what he had just said. Could the man the priest had married be an imposter to stage the ruse for Mariette to gain the certificate? Could Edgar have died after being seen by Dr. Durand? Could Mariette and Jerome have then stolen his name, having previously learned something of his past? But then what of Samuel’s recognition? I said nothing further as I did not want to bother the priest with my clues and thoughts.
I had but one more avenue, which was to view the shipping records beginning at Le Havre before I returned north to Jerome’s orchard to knock on doors in the broken town nearby. Though I was not feeling hopeful. If, according to the doctor, Jerome had left the house before the Germans were eventually chased from the city, it was unlikely due to the timing of this that I would learn much more about Edgar there.
On the train southward to Le Havre, I slowly turned the pages of Edgar’s diary, attempting to interpret his thoughts once more. As vague as they were, I felt closest to him in these words. I wanted so desperately to understand, to relive his experiences, to know him better. Tell me, Edgar. Tell me what you mean?
Turning to his final writings, I caught the pressed blue flower as it slipped from the pages and read the last line again: To the silence I must go.
There was a memory here, I thought, reaching deeply to another time, to something Edgar had once read to me: The silence is breathtaking, she said.
I examined the flower, remembering an occasion he had received one such as this in a letter. Though I was sure the flower was connected to love he had found in France, there was another meaning also.
So many times that day, I had been filled with glimmers of hope, but right in that moment, my wildest hunch seemed the most obvious answer. I was seeing something that had been in front of me all this time.
MARIETTE
FROM 1906
CHAPTER 19
I cannot tell you much about my life before the age of seven. But I can reveal some memories in the years between that and the first real home I had in the year I turned ten. The memories are mostly of my sister Helene, since she was beside me all the way. Serious, always focused on finding the next life for us.
I have only one clear memory of my parents: I can see the light filtering through the red-gold tips of my hair across my face, and I can see Helene standing nearby. She has her back to me. The tracks leading up a hill and away from us are worn and grooved, with slippery clay mud and puddles filled with red-brown water. We are standing under a large tree beside a sparkling river where we’d made our camp, and across the water are fields of purple-blue irises. I look over Helene’s shoulder toward the backs of a man and a woman climbing the track upward. My memories are telling me that they are my parents. The pair doesn’t turn around, but there are others with them who look back guiltily, I think now, though that might be merely wishful.
Helene turns to me with tears streaming down her cheeks, and her pale-green eyes are glittering with the reflection of the river. She is holding our little sister, who is resting her head on my older sister’s shoulder and staring at nothing. I am suddenly afraid, though I don’t know what it is I am to fear. With her free hand Helene takes my hand, and we walk onto the track and into the darkening air. She puts her arm around me, and I can still hear her sniffles even long after dark. And we see lights ahead, and I am relieved because I am so tired and Helene is more so since she has been carrying our younger sister. There are faces, though I don’t remember them exactly, but they are people walking in the street, looking at us strangely, and I see no pity or concern in their eyes. We walk until we find a small house that is raised off the ground, and we crawl under there to sleep. We are wrapped in a blanket that Helene has stolen from somewhere, and I am nestled into Helene’s arms on the damp ground, and our sister is curled up in front of me, but everything is all right because Helene has her arms around both of us, and she has stopped crying.
So I believe that this is the only memory I have of my parents, just the backs of them. Helene, who was nine at the time, told it more coldly. Apparently there was much yelling that I don’t remember, and my mother said she would find us one day but never did. The man our mother left with was neither my father nor hers but he was our parent at the end. Helene remembered the face of the man she thinks was my father, though she couldn’t be sure because there were many men. For some time after, I believed that our mother was kidnapped, but Helene eventually put an end to speculation. We were abandoned, plain and simple. This was sometimes the case for children, especially when groups like us, wanderers, ran out of food and children could not be spared any. I was too young to be angry about the past, and now I am too old to be sad about it.
But apart from that one memory, I have little else of my childhood before my parents left; only the major events feature between that period and the time we met Jerome three years later. I cannot even tell you the name I was given after I was born, if there was one. I had been known simply as jel’enedra or “little sister,” a name that was used so often it became permanent. Some time after we were abandoned, Helene thought to steal for me a proper name from the townspeople, who were not our kind, who walked freely in towns and had their own houses.
There were three of us to start with, which later became two. My younger sister is like a ghost now, whose featureless face and red hair appear inside my head from time to time. And perhaps because she was small, many townspeople felt sorry for her and gave us things, food mostly, a moth-eaten shawl they had buried in a cupboard somewhere, a worn-out pair of boots, and even some dried flowers that I thought was very generous until I grew up and realized that it meant nothing, that food would have been far better.
Though we relied on people giving us things, the nice people from the houses never invited us to stay. We were what I would learn about later, gypsies; a name that people used often to describe vagabonds, thieves, and troublemakers. Some of us were some of those things, but many of us weren’t. Some of us even dreamed about having a life like theirs.
I don’t remember how long we first wandered, perhaps only months when it was the three of us, but one day we found some of our own,
a large group camped by the side of the road beside their horses and wagon, and Helene asked if we could join them, to which they agreed.
Our little sister, who was named Layla, had red hair like me. I believe from this that we shared the same father, unlike Helene. She remembered another man whom she called Papa, who was thrown out of the camp for reasons unknown to her, who also tried to take her with him and was beaten badly for it.
The last memory of Layla was that we stayed with this new group of wanderers for several days, and they fed us after they had eaten enough themselves. They paid special attention to Layla and me because of our hair but even more attention to Layla because she was so pale also. The men, women, and children from this group were burnt from the sun, as if they’d been traveling for weeks in their open wagon, and the event that followed is perhaps why my mind can never be free of the image of them. One day, one of the women said that Helene and I were to pick some wildflowers from the hills and the black-toothed woman, who appeared to be in charge, would say a special charm over them to bring us luck. We were very excited. We ran into the hills that overlooked a valley, and we could see for miles along a snaky river.
We stayed for an hour, rolling down the hills, and we laughed with the sun shining in our eyes. I remember the laughing, and sometimes I still hear it when it is quiet, as if the memory follows me, willing me not to forget. It is not only the sound that I remember but Helene’s face on this day also, smiling back at me as if she had finally found a reason to be joyous. She was brown haired and dark skinned, but her eyes were light, which made her look different from any in our groups. She didn’t match anyone I had or have since seen. She wasn’t as pretty as some, I didn’t think back then. Only later I realized that she was the most beautiful girl I knew; that I still think now.
In a Field of Blue Page 17
