A Coming Evil

by Vivian Vande Velde

  Lisette saw that her aunt was carrying a little overnight bag. "How long are you going to be gone?" she asked as Aunt Josephine leaned to kiss her.

  "The drop is supposed to be tonight," Aunt Josephine said. "But it might get delayed due to weather or..."

  "German patrols," Madame Dumont finished for her.

  Aunt Josephine had the same not-in-front-of-my-daughter expression that Lisette's parents used. For the first time in her life Lisette realized she missed that look. Aunt Josephine continued, "I should be back tomorrow afternoon. If not, no matter what happens, I'll only wait one day. So, tomorrow or Friday afternoon. Make do with the goat's milk. There's no need to go into town. Lisette, it's past time you wrote to your parents."

  Certainly, Lisette thought. I can tell them Cecile is miserable, Aunt Josephine is working me to death, I've gotten a ghost angry with me, and there are German soldiers lurking about ready to discover the Jewish children we're keeping. Thank you for sending me here.

  Cecile wiped vigorously at her eyes. "I still don't see why I can't come," she said.

  "Well," Madame Dumont said, "but you can't."

  And with that they were gone.

  17.

  Wednesday, September 4, 1940

  As soon as Cecile got over her heartbreak at being left home—which lasted about as long as it took for Aunt Josephine to shut the door—she went completely wild.

  "You know what Maman told me?" she asked Lisette in a voice already high and strained with excitement.

  "What?" Lisette asked.

  "She told me I was to listen to you. You know what?"

  Lisette guessed it at the same moment Cecile said it: "Maman's not home."

  Cecile pushed a kitchen chair out of the way and positioned herself for a cartwheel.

  Perhaps it wasn't that she didn't care; perhaps she was misbehaving to hide her worry. But in either case Lisette decided that, all things considered, this was probably something she didn't want to see. She went to get the children from the basement.

  It was a very long day.

  And every time she looked at Anne and Emma, she thought of them in the tipped wagon. For the first time she began to miss her parents, really miss them, not just resent that they'd sent her away. She even took a moment to wonder about François—and she thought of him as François, not as "the baby." She wondered if he was well.

  In the afternoon there was a thunderstorm, and it came as no surprise to Lisette that Anne was afraid of thunderstorms. She clutched Lisette's sweater and howled as the storm drew closer and closer, the thunder coming almost simultaneously with the lightning. Cecile, who Lisette suspected was not nearly as afraid as she pretended, squealed loudly at each flash, which frightened Anne even more. Lisette finally had Etienne pull shut the blackout drapes so that they couldn't see the lightning. But they could still hear the bone-rattling thunder and Anne knew that, seen or not, the lightning was out there. Eventually the thunder moved on, but the rain still pelted at the windows and the wind howled. Anne sobbed herself to sleep despite Louis Jerome, who stood by Lisette's elbow asking, "What if the house gets struck by lightning?"

  By the time Lisette remembered, after supper, that the goat still needed to be milked, she was exhausted.

  And she realized she'd made a foolish mistake.

  It was still raining, so she couldn't milk Softy in the yard by the last of the daylight. She'd have to go in the barn. Though tonight the electricity had stayed on, there was, of course, no electricity in the barn. And even if there had been, she wouldn't have been able to turn on a light because of the blackout regulations. How could she milk a goat she couldn't even see?

  She walked down the back steps carefully, but it must have been too wet out for Mimi the cat, who had apparently found dryer lodgings elsewhere. At least I'm lucky in something, Lisette told herself.

  At first she thought she'd have to bring the goat back into the house and hope it wouldn't make too big a mess. But once she opened the barn door, she realized that there was enough daylight left if she stayed by the door and worked fast.

  She stepped into the barn, out of the rain, and put down the stool she'd brought and the bucket. Something stirred in the darkness of the far corner, but before she could call out, "Here, Softy," the goat came up from behind and gently butted her.

  Germans! Lisette thought in panic.

  "Lisette?"

  Her heart pounded frantically before she recognized that it had been Gerard's soft voice.

  Obviously she was spending too much time with Louis Jerome; his tendency to worry was catching.

  "Gerard." She whispered, too, though the children couldn't have heard even if they'd been on the porch, which they weren't; they were in the front room getting their hair styled by Cecile. "What are you doing here?"

  As he came closer, she saw he'd found a filthy old rag of a towel that he had wrapped around him like a shawl. His longish brown hair was all plastered down and he was wet enough that he actually dripped.

  "Oh, Gerard," she said, "is it raining in your world, too?"

  His eyes widened, but he quickly looked away, hugging himself for warmth. "I'm cold," he'd said the last time they'd been together, and she'd wondered how a ghost could be cold. "My world has faded away totally," he told her. "I can see nothing of it anymore."

  She stopped in the act of reaching out to touch him, afraid to destroy the illusion.

  "And after we parted," he continued, "I was so tired, I lay down on the ground, and I fell asleep. Lisette, I don't remember that happening before. Not since..." He bit his lip and looked at her with huge, frightened eyes. "Am I beginning to fade?"

  "No," she said. Then, more emphatically, "No!" She nodded toward the towel. "Is that yours?" she asked. "Did it come from your world?"

  He looked worried, as though she might be angry that he'd taken it. "No. It was just..." He pointed to show where he'd gotten it. "I'm sorry, I—"

  "Gerard. It's all right. I just wanted to know if you could actually touch..."—she'd almost said "real things"—"things from my world. Let me get a blanket for you." But it was freezing out here. How much good would a blanket do for someone whose clothes were soaked? His teeth were already chattering. "Or ... you could come into the house."

  Gerard shook his head emphatically. "What if your aunt saw me?"

  "She's not here." Lisette sighed. "There is Cecile, though, and the other children."

  Gerard was shaking his head again. "No. It's bad enough being thirteen. I would not want to be ten again."

  "And Cecile isn't even the youngest," Lisette admitted. Would he shoot back and forth in age between her thirteen years and Rachel's six months depending on who was looking at him? And again the even scarier question: What would happen if more than one person looked at him at once? "Perhaps it would be safer out here," she said. "But let me try to find a blanket for you, and a change of clothes." She remembered he'd said before he was hungry. "And some soup." It couldn't hurt to try.

  He gave that distractingly sweet smile that lit up his whole face, and he touched his hand to his heart.

  Cecile must still have been arranging people's hair, because as soon as Lisette entered the house, she heard Anne call from the living room, "Lisette's turn."

  Two words in a row: it may well have been a record. And after I put her in charge of naming the goat, Lisette thought. Traitor. "I still haven't milked Softy," she shouted as she ran up the stairs. "I'm just getting my coat."

  Nobody came to watch her, which was a relief because she really went into Aunt Josephine and Uncle Raymond's room. She got a pair of thick work pants and a heavy brown sweater from the dresser. Hopefully Aunt Josephine didn't miss Uncle Raymond so much that she looked through his clothes to be reminded of him. There were no shoes that she could find, so she took two pairs of woolen socks. From the chest at the foot of the bed she got the extra winter blanket.

  Downstairs, she cut a slab of bread and ladled some of the soup that was left over fr
om supper into a bowl. It was supposed to be tomorrow's lunch, but she could add more pasta later. She'd set the pot on the porch to cool and it was already lukewarm, but since Gerard hadn't eaten in six hundred years, he probably wouldn't be fussy.

  When she got back to the barn, she found that he had milked the goat for her. Apparently he hadn't needed lessons. Apparently knights didn't spend all their time pulling swords out of stones and rescuing maidens.

  "This is wonderful," Gerard said, just from the sight and smell of the meal. Lisette turned her back so he could get out of his wet clothes and into the dry ones. She sat on the milking stool, facing the open door, and petted Softy. Despite what Maurice had said, Softy didn't seem to realize she was a farm animal; she kept butting at Lisette's hand whenever Lisette stopped petting.

  Behind her, in between mouthfuls, Gerard was trying simultaneously to change and carry on a conversation. "Where has your aunt gone?" he asked.

  "A friend came to tell her my uncle is nearby. He's with the army and she hasn't seen him or heard from him since the occupation. Until today, we didn't even know for sure if he was still alive."

  "So meanwhile you watch her children. How many are there?"

  "Actually, only Cecile. But Aunt Josephine has taken in five other children, too. Rachel is the youngest—she's six months old—and Louis Jerome is the oldest. He's eight, though sometimes he sounds about eighty. Then there are the twins, Emma and Anne, who are three years old. And Etienne. I think he's five."

  "Do you have a rope?"

  "Rope?" Lisette echoed. "There was a piece about this long"—she held her hands apart—"by that post over there."

  She peeked as he went to get it. He'd managed to figure out how all the modern clothes went on, but the pants were much too big and the rope was to hold them up. She turned to face him as he settled back down, wrapped in Aunt Josephine's blanket, and took another spoonful of soup. "These are fosterlings?" he asked.

  She had to stop to relocate her place in the conversation. "The children? Do you mean orphans? No, they're Jewish. Except for Emma and Anne. They're Gypsies. Hitler—he's the leader of the Germans—he thinks everybody should have blond hair and blue eyes."

  Gerard paused to consider. The light had gotten so dim, she couldn't make out his face, only the outline of his form. "Why?" he asked.

  "Why?" Lisette repeated. "He's crazy, he doesn't need a reason. He calls Germans the 'master race.' Everybody else is inferior, and Jews and Gypsies are the most inferior of all."

  Gerard shook his head to indicate he didn't understand. "What are Gypsies?"

  "I don't really know much about them," Lisette admitted. "They're a group of people who live out of wagons and wander from country to country..."

  "Pilgrims?"

  "No. They don't have any permanent homes; they always keep moving."

  "Nomads."

  "Yes," Lisette said. "Sort of."

  Gerard wiped up the last of the soup with the last of the bread then put the bowl down on the floor. "Thank you," he said. "That was very good." As she opened her mouth to say you're welcome, he said, "So your aunt has taken in these children so that the Germans won't kill them?"

  "Well, they wouldn't kill them," Lisette said. "They put them in work camps."

  "I don't understand."

  "They put them to work," she explained. "Factories. Farms."

  "They put six-month-old babies to work?"

  Lisette hated it when he got sarcastic. "Obviously not the babies," she said. "But the adults."

  "Lisette," Gerard said, "that makes no sense. Who feeds all these children while the adults work? Who cares for them?"

  Lisette rubbed her arms, wishing she'd worn a coat after all. She thought of the family in the train, the mother and the father, the grandfather and the two children. "I don't know. Maybe the ones who are too old to work."

  Gerard sighed. He spoke slowly, hesitantly. "I know much has changed, but, Lisette, I have seen enough of war ... and the governing of people..."—she almost thought he wasn't going to finish the thought—"to know that the weak and helpless are always the first victims."

  She stood, so quickly that she knocked over the stool. "You think they're killing the children?" she said. "That's ... crazy." But then she remembered she had just told Gerard that Hitler was crazy. Still ... Still ... she thought.

  Yet Gerard would not leave it, even at that. "But that could not be either," he said. "For surely, if the children were being taken away to be killed, the parents would fight. They would refuse to work. And then what good would they be?"

  Unlike Gerard, Lisette had not seen much of war or the governing of people. But she knew he was right and she didn't think she'd ever be warm again. Did Aunt Josephine or her parents suspect? Did anybody? She thought again of the family on the train—three generations: grandfather, parents, children. Had they guessed? Whispering, barely able to get the words out, she guessed: "They're killing them all."

  18.

  Wednesday, September 4, 1940 – Thursday, September 5, 1940

  When Lisette went back into the house, Cecile was waiting for her, tapping her foot impatiently. "You took long enough," she said.

  "I don't feel well," Lisette said. And perhaps the truth of this showed on her face, for Cecile didn't argue. Emma, who had been holding Anne's feet while Anne tried to stand on her head on the couch, said, "What's the matter?" And Etienne stopped pretending he was an airplane, so that Louis Jerome, presumably another airplane, ran into him.

  Lisette couldn't stand to look at them. "I'm going to bed," she said. She was whispering, because her head hurt. "And it's time everybody five and under went to bed, too."

  "Wait," Cecile said. "Aren't you going to help?"

  "No," Lisette answered. "Do it quickly and quietly and start cleaning up the mess you've made, because if you don't, I'm going to make you do it tomorrow anyway and it'll be easier if you start now."

  "Bossy," Cecile called after her as she slowly climbed the stairs.

  "What if she's real sick?" she heard Louis Jerome ask. "What if she dies?"

  Lisette didn't wait to hear Cecile's answer. She closed the bedroom door behind her and climbed into bed fully clothed, stopping only long enough to kick off her shoes. She pulled the blanket up over her head and closed her eyes tightly and willed herself to fall asleep, but she couldn't.

  The children came upstairs. Cecile and Louis Jerome were fairly well organized and more or less quiet. Emma called, "Good night"—presumably to her—but she didn't answer.

  Cecile opened the bedroom door and whispered, "Are you awake, Lisette?"

  Lisette pretended she wasn't.

  Cecile changed into her nightgown by the light of the hallway so she didn't have to turn on the bedroom light, which was more consideration than Lisette would have expected, especially since Lisette still had her head under the covers. When Cecile climbed into bed, Lisette turned her back on her.

  "Good night, Lisette," Cecile whispered.

  Lisette bit her lip and didn't answer that either.

  ***

  She did finally fall asleep. It seemed like hours, but Cecile had no clock in her room, so Lisette had no idea how long it really was. And when she woke up again, she couldn't tell if she'd slept for five minutes or five hours. Cecile was still asleep.

  Lisette climbed out of bed and peeled back the corner of the blackout curtain. The edge of the sky was just beginning to turn from gray to pink. At least it had finally stopped raining.

  Without Aunt Josephine to rouse them, there was no telling how late everybody would sleep. At least another couple of hours, she estimated.

  She washed her hands and face, which made her feel better as long as she didn't think about what she had learned last night.

  The electricity had gone off sometime during the night, but the gas was still on, so Lisette was able to heat water on the stove. While she waited for it to boil, she went into Uncle Raymond's study, where she found a book called Chivalry
in the Middle Ages, which she brought back into the kitchen. She got out the coffee maker and spooned in some of the roasted acorn grounds Aunt Josephine had bought yesterday. It didn't smell half bad, and when it was ready, she poured it out into two mugs. She put the mugs on a cookie sheet, along with some more bread and several clusters of grapes and the book, and carried it all out to the barn.

  She braced herself for Gerard's not being there, but he was lying on the floor, his head resting on Softy's side, in the shaft of light from the door she'd just opened. For one awful second—she must stop listening to Louis Jerome—she had the impression he was dead, or, at least, more dead than usual.

  In the same instant she realized that his chest was moving up and down, Softy awoke and scrambled to her feet. Gerard's head hit the barn floor with a very solid thump.

  He went from sound asleep to alert-to-danger faster than she would have believed possible. He got his feet under him and went into a defensive crouch, his hand going to his side—for his sword, she knew instinctively. Thank goodness he hadn't had one at this age or he might have taken her head off before he'd realized his mistake.

  She kept forgetting that, despite appearances, he was a twenty-seven-year-old knight.

  "Good morning," she said, putting down the tray.

  "Good morning," he answered. She also wouldn't have thought it possible that he could blush, but she could see the embarrassed flush creeping over his cheeks.

  She also kept forgetting that, despite appearances, he'd been dead for the past six hundred years.

  "I thought you might not come back," he told her.

  She hadn't stopped to wonder what he might think. She had been so upset last night she had run out of the barn and into the house, and of course Gerard had not dared follow nor call after her.

  Lisette shook her head. "All you did was point out what I should have already seen. It does no good to be angry at you. That's like killing the bearer of bad news."

  From his look, he didn't understand her reference.