Once More Unto the Breach

by Meghan Holloway

  A sound from the bed brought my head up. Sévèrin still slept, but she whimpered and her brow creased. Rage welled within me as I studied her. A bracelet of raw welts and abrasions ringed her wrists. Her arms bore scrapes and scratches. Her face had been met with a fist so many times over I could tell nothing of her features. One eye was swollen shut, the livid purple bruise extending down over her cheek. There was a lump on her jaw, and her lip was split. Her nose was broken, blackening the eye that was not swollen shut. My own fists clenched, and when she whimpered again, curling in on herself and wrapping her broken arm tighter around her stomach, I said her name softly.

  She jolted awake, the one eye she was able to open going wide. Her gaze locked on me, and she struggled to push herself upright. “Owain?” She paused and studied me more closely. The tears welling in her good eye and the tremor in her busted lips gave me the answer I had traveled across France to find.

  “His father,” I said, voice rough, and she nodded, breath hitching. She was propped on the elbow of the arm that was not broken. “May I assist you?”

  “S’il vous plaît. Please.”

  I stood and eased her upright. In another time, I imagined she was tall and svelte, but she felt skeletal now under my hands, and I propped the thin pillows behind her so the battered girl could recline more comfortably. I dragged the chair closer to the bedside and watched Owain’s wife study me.

  “My son is dead.”

  Her face worked. “He is.”

  I turned my head and took a deep breath. I do not want to see your face again until you have learned to be a man who accepts his duties. The weight in my chest grew heavier. “Will you tell me how?”

  I turned my gaze back to her when she remained silent to find her eyes closed. “Owain is…was a strong man. As his father, you know this.” The knot in my throat grew larger, harder. “He would not tell them. He said nothing, no matter what they did to him. And they hurt him.” She opened her one good eye, but she did not meet my gaze and instead stared blankly at the opposite wall. “The man in charge…” A shudder wracked her frame. “He said the easiest way to break a man is to hurt a woman.” Her hand crept to her face, and she fingered her bruised and swollen cheekbone. “He…he just kept hitting me and h-hitting me. I was so afraid. For me and the baby. For Owain.” Her hand dropped and fisted in the sheet. “And then one of the guards…He…” A tear slid down her battered cheek.

  I leaned forward but made no move to reach for her. “You do not need to continue.”

  She shook her head. “Non. I do. You should know.” She took a deep, shuddering breath and cupped her hand over her rounded stomach. “He told Owain he would…he would c-cut the baby from my womb. I could hear Owain screaming the entire time. I have never…It was like the sound of a tortured animal.” She looked up at me, gaze beseeching. “I do not know how he freed himself. He was always so gentle. He could never bear to see even the slightest creature hurt.”

  I remembered the countless injured animals he had brought to me when he was a child: his triumph when we could save them, his devastation when we could not.

  “He broke his bonds,” she whispered. “And beat the man to death with the chair. It was like something wild was unleashed in him. The guards could not pull him away.” She extended a trembling hand, and I clasped it in my own. “They shot him. The guards. They k-killed my Owain. Our Owain.” A sob escaped her, raw and broken. “Je suis désolée. I am so sorry.”

  She clung to my hand, and I left the chair to sit on the edge of the bed. She did not flinch away from me, and when I settled beside her, she leaned into me. I wrapped my arm carefully around her slight shoulders, and she sagged, slumping against me.

  The sounds tearing from her throat were painful to hear. I ran my hand over her hair and cupped the back of her head in my palm as I had done countless times in the past to comfort Owain. “Shh now. Shh.”

  I rocked back and forth. My shirt grew damp under her cheek, and I held her as she wept herself into an exhausted sleep. My own eyes burned but remained dry.

  24 April 1944

  Dear Nhad,

  The bombings in the 18th arrondissement have killed over 600 people.

  Yesterday, Pétain returned to the city for the funeral.

  Even after all of this, he is still revered by the people.

  -Owain

  xxiii

  Grief and I had long been acquaintances, but now it met me in an unfamiliar guise. When I lost Aelwyd and the twins, and later my father, I had been gorged to excess on pain and anger. Grief had been a wolf pacing within the confines of my chest, gnashing at my heart, howling and feral and bitter.

  This new grief flayed me down to bone and marrow. It whittled me to husk. My cleaved, bloodless heart pulsed only out of habit, not out of want. Where before my grief had been a rage and torment, now it felt like a biting wind sweeping across a barren expanse. I was hollowed out to emptiness.

  If I allowed myself, I would drown in the vast desolation. I could not allow myself to consider that temptation. Not when someone depended on me.

  Sévèrin woke screaming in the night, her cries flaying me as I thought of what she had suffered. What Owain had endured.

  She clung to my hand in the aftermath, breath uneven, swollen face damp. I pulled my chair close to her bedside told her stories of Owain’s youth, of the bright, caring, inquisitive young boy he had been. When she finally drifted into a peaceful sleep, I started to withdraw my hand, but her fingers tightened around mine and her eyes fluttered open.

  “Will you take me home?” she whispered, voice raw.

  Underneath the violent bruising, behind the swell of child at her midsection, she was little more than a girl, barely twenty years of age.

  “Aye. Paris is a mere two-day journey from here. Once you are well—”

  “Non. Not to Paris.” She swallowed. “Owain and I…we planned to return home after the war. His, your home. He spoke of it often.” I turned my face away to hide my emotion, and she hesitantly touched my arm. “Will you mind? Is it not agreeable to you? I do not—”

  I clasped her fingers gently. They felt as fragile as a child’s. She carried a remnant of my son within her and was my one connection to the man he had grown to be since I had cast him out. “I would be pleased to take you home.”

  Her smile was tremulous, a shadow of what it once was, I was certain. But the tension in her shoulders eased.

  The next day, I set about securing our passage home. I had transport arranged to take us north with a medical convoy headed to the Siegfried Line. We would leave the convoy as they branched to the east, and Paris would be a day’s journey to the northwest. I could find transport to the coast from there, and if need be, I would steal a dinghy and row us across the Channel. I did not think it would come to that. But then, I had not expected to cross France in an ambulance and climb the Alps on the cusp of winter either.

  And I had not expected to return home without my son. It ate at me, and I roamed the streets of Lyon for two days. Searching for what, I did not know. Finding his body would be an impossible task. Sévèrin knew nothing of where they had been held, only that it was dark and cold.

  It was during my second day of searching the city that I came across a familiar face. “Colonel.”

  The American officer studied me for a moment. “The man with the ambulance from Paris. You aided us at the hospital.”

  “Rhys Gravenor.” I took in the dozen men behind him, all soldiers who appeared ready for action. “Are there German holdouts still in the city?”

  “We’ve searched every hideout in this city, but there have been some rumors of activity.”

  “May I join you?” The colonel’s gray eyebrows arched. “I am searching for my son. He was held by the Gestapo in Lyon.”

  The American’s gaze was shrewd and assessing. After a moment, he said, “Walk with us, Gravenor.” I fell into step beside him. “We have heard word that the
Butcher and others are in retreat to Bruyères.”

  “The Butcher?”

  “Man by the name of Barbie. He was the head of the Gestapo here in Lyon. From reports, the title of Butcher was well earned.” We soon entered an area of the city that was reduced to rubble from the air raids. The destination appeared to have once been a school. “Our information says he’s in retreat, but there have been reports of renewed activity around these remains of their headquarters.” He waved his squad of men forward. “Wait here.”

  They fanned out and swept the area with such careful, choreographed precision that I knew they had performed this task a number of times. I waited as they disappeared into the bowels of the rubble and kept an eye on the street and surviving rooftops.

  Long minutes passed before I heard a sharp whistle. The colonel gestured for me.

  His face was grim as I approached. “We’ve found something.”

  He led me down a crumbling staircase. In the basement, a false wall had been removed to expose a heavy iron door. The door stood open, and a young soldier was bent double to the side of the threshold, vomiting.

  The colonel squeezed his shoulder.

  “Fucking Krauts,” the young man gasped, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Take some air, son.” The colonel met my gaze. “I hope your boy is not here.”

  I had to duck my head to clear the doorway, and the tightness of the hidden passageway assaulted my senses at the same time the smell hit me like a physical blow.

  The smell threatened to choke me, and I staggered over the putrid dead who lay rotting where they had been felled. The stench clung to the man draped over my shoulders, though he was not dead. Not yet.

  My breath was loud in my ears, and I could taste the overwhelming odor cloaking the landscape at the back of my throat. Arthur whimpered, and then I heard it as well: voices speaking in German.

  I gripped Arthur’s knees and arm as I ran through the slight cover of the woods. Most of the trees had been mown down as ruthlessly as the men, and I could only hope the shadows of the gloaming cloaked us.

  They also cloaked the deep wound in the earth, and when the ground disappeared beneath my feet, I had to clench my teeth to hold in my shout.

  We fell, tumbling with a shower of loose earth and severed limbs. I lost my grip on Arthur, and though my fall was cushioned by the bodies in the bowels of the trench, the landing drove the breath from my lungs. The smell that plumed from the bodies when I landed made my stomach revolt and try to crawl into my mouth.

  Arthur groaned somewhere nearby, and I forced myself upright, scrambling over the dead to reach him. There was still enough light to make out the terror etched into his face. The breath rattled in his lungs, and I lifted him to lean against my chest. His legs lay in a tangle, rendered useless along with his arms by the bullet that had struck his spine.

  “This is…not…” He struggled for a breath. “The adventure…you promised.”

  I gripped fistfuls of his tattered uniform and pressed our foreheads together. “I am sorry. I never should have talked you into coming with me.”

  He wheezed a soundless laugh. “If it was…an adventure…couldn’…let you go…alone.”

  I forced the sob welling in my chest into submission. “Quiet now. I can hear them in the woods.”

  “Rhys.” I drew back and met his gaze. “Don’…let them…take me. End it…now.”

  “No, Arthur, no. Do not ask that of me.”

  Blood snaked from the corner of his mouth. “Please.”

  I stared at him, at the face whose softness had been shorn away to hard lines. It was a face I knew as well as my own, a face so similar to his sister’s. We had done everything together, born days apart, bonded as friends from birth. I had always led, and he had always followed. Always. Even to this hell.

  My hand trembled as I drew the knife from my boot. His face blurred before mine.

  “Marry…my sister…when you…get…home,” he breathed.

  “I intend to,” I promised him.

  “Already…brothers.”

  “We are. We always were.” My voice was choked by a sob. “Close your eyes now.”

  “Thank—”

  The blade I slipped between his ribs and into his heart interrupted him. The last breath left him on a sigh, and his head lolled against my shoulder.

  I slung the knife away and gathered him in my arms, rocking back and forth, clutching him to me.

  It began with a fine tremor that shook through every muscle and fiber within me. My chest worked like a bellows. The stench around me clogged my throat and sank deep into my skin.

  It filled me to overflowing, and I threw my head back, screaming and raging at the blackening sky.

  “That way is a dead end.” I blinked, returning to the present, and the colonel gestured to the right with a jut of his chin. “The rooms appear to have been used as storage and bunking. The rest…Come this way.”

  It stank of misery, fear, and pain in the tunnels. The deeper we ventured into the cave-like structures, the stronger the stench grew.

  I breathed through my mouth, shallow and slow, and could taste the desperation. I focused on placing one foot in front of the other, gaze centered on the colonel’s back ahead of me to keep the illusion of the walls closing in around me at bay. Owain could be here, and I would not leave him to rot in this harrowing place.

  The first room I entered appeared to be an office, a mundane room furnished with a small desk and four chairs. One of the chairs was overturned in the center of the room with a girl tied face-down over it. She was naked, her back, buttocks, and thighs flayed and pulverized to meat and bone.

  “Esgob annwyl,” I breathed, and started toward her.

  The colonel stayed me with a hand on my shoulder. “She’s dead, Gravenor. They all are.”

  And they were. All three dozen prisoners kept in half as many small rooms off the dark, narrow corridor. All tortured until they were twisted, misshapen lumps of broken humanity. Each killed with a single bullet to the head. Men and women, young and old. The youngest was a girl no more than fifteen and much had been done to her before death was meted to her. The sound of retching echoed in the tunnel.

  “Sir?” The call came from the last room off the corridor. “There is something here you should see.”

  The room was slightly larger than the others. A table, the surface polished with the brown stain of old blood, stood in the center of the room. A man was sprawled on the floor, the place where his face should be a black mass of shattered gore. A broken chair lay splintered around his caved skull. His uniform marked him as a member of the Wehrmacht.

  “He broke his bonds,” she whispered. “And beat the man to death with the chair. It was like something wild was unleashed in him. The guards could not pull him away.”

  I rubbed my forehead and pinched the bridge of my nose. The blood stains on the floor haunted me.

  “They shot him. The guards. They k-killed my Owain. Our Owain.”

  “I think my son was here, but he is not among the dead.”

  The colonel did not ask how I knew but instead led us in our retreat up to the street. Each man’s face was tight and drawn.

  “Take some air, gentlemen,” the colonel said. “And then we are going back for those poor souls.”

  “Thank you, Colonel.”

  He turned to me. “I am both sorry we did not find your son and glad he was not in that hellhole. Good luck to you, Gravenor.”

  “And to you, sir.”

  He took a deep breath and faced his men. “Let’s go get them, boys. Not a one is to be left in that place.”

  I walked the streets in a daze, unable to rid myself of the sight of that small, rank room with the bloody table and floor. Of the sightless eyes and mangled bodies. Of the smell of the horrors that had been committed there. I staggered and turned into an alley, bracing myself against the stone wall. I gagged and co
ughed, but my stomach stayed in a knot and did not empty itself onto the cobbles at my feet.

  I leaned my head against the rough exterior I braced myself against, the stone cool against my forehead. Fury coursed through me, hot and swift, and the temptation to drive my fist against the stone almost overwhelmed me. A broken hand would only be a hindrance, though, and one I could not afford right now. I closed my eyes and breathed, and the rage abated, leaving behind only numbness. I found myself fervently wishing for Charlotte’s presence by my side, her cool hand on my arm.

  I straightened, pushing myself upright, and followed the tangle of streets back to the hospital. I passed a nurse in the corridor as I reached the ward where Sévèrin recovered.

  “You only just missed the other gentleman, monsieur.”

  It took a moment for her words to register, but when they did, I stopped and turned back, attention sharpened. “What other gentleman?”

  My tone made her pause, and her forehead wrinkled. “The man who brought the young woman in a few days ago.”

  Sévèrin had no memory of how she arrived at the hospital, and when I asked the orderlies, none knew the details. I glanced down the empty corridor. “He was here?”

  “Oui. He wanted to know the condition of the young woman.”

  “I would have liked to thank him.” And ask him where he had found Sévèrin. It could aid my search.

  “I told him that, but he would not stay.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Only moments.”

  “What did he look like?”

  She spread her hands. “Like the usual man. Not short, not tall. Not thick, not thin. I am sorry, I do not recall any details.”

  I waved away her apology and rubbed the back of my neck.

  “Although, he did wear a homburg hat. I noticed, because it was black.” She said it with enough skepticism for me to know the color was significant, but the significance eluded me.

  I retreated back down the corridor and stairs in ground-eating strides. I rushed out into the street, glancing first to the north. Seeing no one wearing a black hat, I looked to the south, just in time to see a man capped in black turn east.