The car continued to fill up until people were sitting in the aisle and no more could cram on. Then the train rumbled out of the station, jerking and rocking as it picked up speed.
Pulling the scarf closer around her face, Genevieve did her best to block out the motion, the racketing of the wheels over the rails, the buzz of many disparate conversations and all the unpleasant smells that resulted from too many people stuffed into too small a space. German soldiers patrolled the train, appearing without warning at the end of the car to pick their way down its length while closely eyeing the occupants before moving on to the next. After a single unwary glance, she kept her gaze averted from the unappetizing sight of a Wehrmacht officer and his French ladylove kissing and pawing each other in the seat in front of her and thus earning shocked mutters of “Shame” and “No decency” from the women beside her.
Instead she looked out at the passing countryside. At first she concentrated on the sights of the city, and then the just-greening fields and small villages and farms. Soon enough, though, she was staring blindly through the glass as everything outside herself faded away.
Her mother, her father, her sister: their faces were all she could see. Their voices were all she could hear.
She had been the little one, the quick-tempered one. The rebel of the family, while her sister had been the perfect child.
“Pretty is as pretty does.” She could hear her elegant, aristocratic mother scolding her for some transgression, using the rebuke that had become an oft-repeated refrain from the time she had entered her teens. She could see the reproving look in the aquamarine eyes that in shape and color were so like her own, the despairing shake of Baroness Lillian de Rocheford’s well-coiffed head.
“You can’t do those things, bébé.” Emmy—Emmanuelle, her sister, four years older and fair-haired like their father but with those same aquamarine eyes, the unspoken beauty of the family—chimed in, always on their mother’s side, scandalized by yet another breach of propriety on the part of her junior.
Paul, her handsome, easygoing father, defended her: “It is good that she is high-spirited. What, would you have her be boring?”
“I would rather her be boring than a scandal,” her mother answered grimly, and her father laughed, and Emmy looked serious, and she—she would toss her head and do just as she pleased and think that her mother was stuffy and her sister a bore and nothing bad could ever happen to her. Until something bad did.
“Cherbourg!”
The conductor’s bawling announcement of the train’s arrival brought Genevieve back to the present with a thud. Her breathing came too fast and her pulse raced and she felt—undone.
Leave the past in the past, she warned herself, repeating the words Max had said to her and growing impatient at herself for remembering them so well, then felt a chilly frisson of foreboding as she realized how impossible that now was. Cherbourg was the past, and she was here.
Disembarking, hurrying toward the bus that would take her the rest of the way to her destination, Genevieve was glad of the sunlight and the gentle caress of the wind blowing in off the sea. It was warmer here than in Paris, as it tended to be except in the dead of summer, when it was the reverse. Inhaling deeply of the briny-scented air, she tasted salt on her tongue and felt her stomach clench at the familiarity of it.
I’m almost home.
The smell and taste of the sea formed the backdrop of her childhood. It was ingrained in her memory just like the endless beaches and the big houses lining the boulevard by the bay and the tall hedgerows that served as living fences between even the most insignificant properties. The fifteenth-century walls, the bridge arching over the Divette, the narrow streets and small shops, the green parks, the stone houses, all were unchanged.
What had changed was that the town was now thick with Germans, civilians as well as soldiers bearing insignia of all ranks and service branches. Military trucks rattled through the streets. The docks where local fishermen had once cast their nets had been turned into a fortress of huge concrete walls dotted by manned lookout towers and a host of antiaircraft guns. A stopping point for large transatlantic ocean liners, including the doomed Titanic, Cherbourg during the Great War had been a major arrival and departure point for American and British troops. Now as the only deepwater port in the region, and with England only 112 kilometers away directly across La Manche, the English Channel, the town was of vital strategic importance to this second wave of murderous Germans. It was, therefore, heavily defended. Every weaponized aquatic vessel from torpedo boats to destroyers, including one the approximate size of a stadium, bobbed at anchor in the harbor.
As the bus trundled through each successive neighborhood, Genevieve saw more and more damage, houses burned to their foundations, whole blocks reduced to rubble, craters in the streets. Anger filled her, and she was silently cursing the Germans when she heard a pair of fellow passengers damning the Brits and the Americans for the destruction, blaming them for blitzing the town with almost nightly air raids.
“The bombs will stop soon enough,” one of them, a graybeard in a tattered overcoat, consoled the other. “They will attack once too often with their waves of aeroplanes, and Göring and his Luftwaffe will be waiting. Rommel is here, too, to beat them back if they try to land along the coast. The Tommies and their friends stand no chance of winning against those two. They will be defeated in the air and on the land. The war will be over before you know it.”
“The whole world is turning upside down,” his stooped and bespectacled companion said, and sighed. “What can you do? We must all adapt as best we can.”
This sense of fatalism, the certainty that the military juggernaut that was Germany could not be defeated, was widespread among her fellow citizens. The many who took that view looked with horror and rage on those French who were in the Resistance, who actively worked to undermine the Reich. The fear was that the rash actions of a few would bring hideous reprisals down upon them all.
The bus was well out in the countryside now, one of the few nonmilitary vehicles on the road that skirted the vast salt marsh where she had passed many a pleasant hour exploring during her childhood. Cool and dark, mysterious and dangerous, the swamp was avoided as a matter of course by most, although it nevertheless managed to claim fresh victims every year. Taught to respect it by her mother, Genevieve had also been taught its secrets. She had missed it, she realized as she caught fleeting glimpses of brackish water glinting among tall reeds, missed the sense of freedom she had found there, missed its wildness and its magic.
Through the windows she began to spot familiar landmarks. The hollow tree where bees often swarmed in the summer, the bog that had trapped the Paquets’ horse, the Cheviots’ now tumbledown barn—they brought the past alive again for her in a vivid rush of nostalgia. Then the one in particular she had been watching for came into view, and she jumped up and pulled the rope to request a stop.
Chapter Thirteen
The narrow stone bridge that arched across the stream running parallel to the road had a gravel path twisting uphill through a thick wood on the other side of it. It was there that Genevieve left the bus to continue her journey on foot. The bridge was hand built in the previous century of local stone. As she crossed it, the creek, brown and shallow, babbled over the rocks as it had always done. In the summers she and Emmy had waded in that creek, their shoes off and their skirts tucked up. Sometimes they’d been alone, sometimes they’d been joined by Phillippe Cheviot, son of the farmer who’d owned the aforementioned barn. In those later summers, Phillippe, who was Emmy’s age exactly, had seemed to spend a lot of time fishing that creek. She realized only later that he’d done so because he’d been crazy in love with Emmy—all the boys, it seemed, had been crazy in love with Emmy, but he’d had an advantage because he lived so close. She, of course, had followed the little-sister script by falling crazy in love with Phillippe. The heartbreak that had result
ed—there’d been so much heartbreak, too much heartbreak, she couldn’t bear remembering.
If we’d only known what was to come.
But the terrible truth of life was that it was never given to anyone to know what the future held.
Thrusting the shade of her younger self, their younger selves, from her mind, she concentrated instead on what lay ahead as she followed the familiar path that twisted this way and that through a medley of beeches and oaks and pines and hawthorns.
The branches, some thorny, some budding with newly green leaves, some evergreen and heavy with needles, interlaced above her head, forming a dim tunnel. Climbing, she took in the smell of resin and pine and broom, listened to the chatter of birds and squirrels, and realized she was running only when she burst out into the clearing at the bottom of the final rise and looked up past the final ten meters of sheer granite cliff that rose like a wall in front of her—and there it was.
Rocheford.
She stopped where she was, breathing hard, as her heart swelled and her throat choked tight.
Situated on a promontory that jutted out over a rocky beach and crashing waves far below, with unparalleled views of the harbor and the sea in one direction and the estuary and its surroundings in the other, the château was four stories tall with a soaring slate roof. Built in the seventeenth century in the Louis XIII baroque style, its facade of stone and brick had faded over the centuries to a soft rose-and-cream coloration. Heavily decorated with stone carvings of gargoyles and related otherworldly creatures above the eaves and around the innumerable arched windows, it bore the de Rocheford coat of arms embedded in the pediment above the front door. The gardens and grounds encompassed the five plus hectares at the top of the promontory. The home farm and the fields used in the cultivation of the Melon de Bourgogne grapes that were the estate’s lifeblood spread out at the base of the cliff for another two hundred hectares.
Looking up at the house, a thousand memories swirled through her head in an instant: not the later years, when the economy had crashed and they’d had to sell Maman’s jewelry and then the furniture piece by piece to survive, but the earlier ones, the happier ones. Running into Emmy’s room at night when storms raged and thunder boomed so close above the château that the very walls seemed to shake, jumping into her sister’s bed and huddling under the covers with her until the night grew still again; singing, always singing, especially Maman’s favorite, “Ca c’est Paris,” in duet with Emmy as Maman played the Mistinguett tune on the piano in the green parlor; hanging over the banister, first with Emmy and then, as Emmy grew up, alone, watching the girls in their swirling dance frocks, the boys with their slicked-back hair and correct evening clothes that made them look so grown up. She remembered Emmy, sixteen at the time, beautiful in a white party dress, looking up to find her there behind the banister where the two of them used to watch the partygoers together. Emmy had smiled and waved, just a small wave, not enough to give her little sister’s presence away, and whispered, “Je te tiens, tu me tiens.” It was their catchphrase—I’ve got you, you’ve got me—taken from a nursery rhyme in a book their mother used to read to them, and it immediately made Genevieve feel better, reassuring her that the twosome that had been her and Emmy was unbroken. Then, later, Emmy had brought up a selection of delicacies from the refreshment table that they’d shared, giggling at the tales Emmy told about the boys she’d danced with, before Emmy went down to rejoin the festivities. Genevieve felt a stab of nostalgia for those long-ago days, for the way things had been, for the glittering parties she had never, in all the years she had lived there, been officially old enough to attend—not that that had stopped her. Nothing and no one had ever been able to stop her from doing anything she chose, although her mother had certainly tried.
Maman. Papa. Emmy. How she longed for them.
Despite the way it had ended, despite the darkness and the pain, all she wanted to do in that moment was race the rest of the way to the top of the cliff, race up the imposing stone staircase that led to the front door, race inside to them.
But they’re all gone. The shaft of pain that accompanied the thought was agonizing.
A flag had been mounted beside the front door. The wind caught it, set it to waving. Red, white and black: a swastika.
Her mind recoiled. She took an instinctive step back.
Papa would never permit...
But they said he was dead.
A German soldier came out the front door. An officer in a peaked cap and greatcoat, calling a cheerful “Auf Wiedersehen” to someone behind him in the house.
Genevieve melted into the shadow of the trees as two soldiers came running around the side of the château to stand at attention while the officer descended the steps. At the same time, a big black Mercedes-Benz, its tires crunching over the gravel drive, came round from the back where the garages and stables were located. One of the soldiers opened the rear car door. The officer got in, the soldier slammed the door shut and the car drove away.
The soldiers then went up the steps and into the house. She could only assume they were quartered there.
Her heart gave an odd little kick. With a real effort of will she managed to shift a mental gear that put her immediate visceral reaction behind her. That there were Nazis living at Rocheford was simply one more blow she had to accept, one more desecration wrought by war.
Turning, she walked swiftly through the trees along the path that wound through this last heavily wooded part of the cliff.
If her mother was in hiding, she would not be in the house anyway.
But Genevieve had a good idea where she might be.
That knowledge was the reasonable part of what had prompted her headlong rush to Rocheford. The other part was pure unreasoning emotion.
Leaving the path, pushing through a tangle of hollies and gorse overhung with vines, she reached the fissure in the rock that would be invisible to anyone outside the curtain of plants and slipped inside. The passage was narrow and crooked, a tight fit in places even for someone as slender as herself. The stone on either side was the rough, cold granite of the cliff that supported the house. Barely enough light filtered through to enable her to see the wooden door at the end—and, beside it, the knee-level gash in the stone that was just wide enough for a woman’s smallest finger to probe inside.
She crouched, probed and found it, stashed away in that crack where it had been kept for the whole of her life, and longer: a key.
Fishing it out, she unlocked the door, then tucked the key safely back inside the gash. Doing so had been drilled into her by her mother, whose spare key it was, until the action became as automatic as breathing.
She pushed the door open. The heavy panel moved without making a sound: no creak, no groan. Which told her that the door had been used recently and had been cared for to prevent the rust and swelling with which the damp sea air afflicted all things wooden and metal.
No sound, either, from inside what was in essence a small natural cave that opened through a door on its other end into the outermost of the château’s labyrinthian cellars.
Genevieve found herself hesitating on the threshold, peering cautiously into pitch darkness as a pungent fishy odor rolled out to envelop her.
She knew that smell: mushrooms. It brought her mother back to her as vividly as if Lillian stood before her. All her life, her mother had studied mushrooms, collected them, cultivated them.
Her hopes soared: she had not been inside the cave in years, but it was obvious from the ease with which she had opened the door, from the smell—living, growing mushrooms—from the very quality of the air, that someone made frequent and familiar use of it.
Who could it be, except—
“Ach, look, it’s the BDM!” That taunting cry—the BDM was the League of German Girls, the distaff segment of the Hitler Youth—made her jump. The voice belonged to a man she could only assume was
a soldier. It floated down from above, from the château grounds. A second soldier, clearly indignant at being jeeringly called a girl, shot back, “Shut your mouth, imbecile, and get moving.”
A shiver of warning slid down Genevieve’s spine as she was reminded of exactly how close the Germans were. She closed her lips, which had been parted to call out to her mother: she dared not, lest she bring the soldiers down upon them.
Cursing herself for not having thought to bring a torch, she walked cautiously inside the cave, looking about her as she traversed the well-worn stone underfoot. It was warmer in here, and the air was heavy and moist. The shaft of dim light from the open doorway allowed her to see only so far: the high curved ceiling, the uneven corners, the nooks and crannies shrouded in gloom. Her mother, unsurprisingly, was nowhere to be seen.
If Lillian was in hiding, logic dictated that she would have whisked out of sight at the opening of the door. If she was injured, she could be lying on the floor, tucked into a corner, curled up anywhere, concealed by darkness.
Narrowing her eyes, Genevieve tried probing the shadows: she could see nothing.
Only then did it occur to her to wonder what she would do with her mother if she found her. Save her had been the impetus that had driven her to Cherbourg, but exactly how that was to be accomplished she hadn’t questioned. Now she did. The logistics were daunting: she had to be back in Paris, at the theater and prepared to go onstage, for a six o’clock show. Attempting the return journey in the company of a woman being actively hunted by the Nazis would be beyond risky. If Lillian was wounded or injured, the task of getting her to Paris became that much harder. It was also possible that Lillian would be too injured to travel. Then what?
The Black Swan of Paris Page 13
