Chateau of Secrets: A Novel

by Melanie Dobson

  She heard the shuffle of feet and a little boy stepped in front of her. Michel. He must have followed her from the tunnel. “Don’t touch her,” he said.

  Philippe’s gaze flickered down to the boy. “You seem to be collecting children, Gisèle.”

  She put her arm around the boy’s shoulders, pulling him close to her. “He hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  “Bravery I admire, but not stupidity.”

  The boy lurched forward, his fists clenched in front of him, but she held him back. She was so proud of him, standing resolute in front of her, ready to die for someone he loved.

  A German soldier stepped into the smoky light. “I will take over.”

  Philippe’s pistol shook. “She is mine,” he replied in German.

  Josef wrapped his fingers around her arm. “No, she is Oberst Seidel’s.”

  She’d never heard Josef speak with such authority, as if there was no doubt that Philippe had to obey.

  But Philippe refused to concede. “I will take her to the Oberst.”

  A bomb hit the prison behind her cousin, and in seconds, the centuries of stone collapsed into rubble. If Philippe didn’t shoot them, it wouldn’t be long before one of the soldiers or a bomb took all of them. The bombs didn’t differentiate between enemies and allies.

  “I said I will handle this.” Josef yanked on her arm, and she lurched toward him. “You are Philippe Borde, are you not?”

  Philippe’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know my name?”

  “Major von Kluge is searching for you.” He glanced both ways before he spoke again. “He fears he might have been mistaken about the death of Michel Duchant.”

  Philippe dropped the gun to his side. Then he raced the other way.

  Josef clasped both arms behind her back and did the same with the boy, prodding them both down the sidewalk. His two prisoners until they reached the end of town.

  Then the three of them ran.

  It wasn’t until much later, when they reached the chapelle, that she saw fresh blood pooling on Josef’s sleeve.

  — CHAPTER 60 —

  “After the war . . .” Lisette whispered. “Gisèle never returned or tried to contact us. I didn’t think she cared about what happened to Adeline. Or to me.”

  I reached over for Lisette’s hand and we sat in silence for a moment, processing Eddie’s story, which collided with both of ours.

  “Hauptmann Milch was a hero,” Lisette said.

  “Why did you tell Riley that you didn’t know him?”

  “There were a lot of German men named Josef.”

  I sipped my tea. “But you knew who he was talking about in the interview.”

  “I figured Josef wanted to keep his story secret, like I didn’t want anyone to know mine.”

  I let her words settle for a moment as I stared at Eddie’s face, paused on the computer screen. “The orphan boy was my father, wasn’t it?”

  “The Germans put me on a train,” Lisette said. “I don’t know what happened after I left.”

  But I knew Stéphane was right. My father wasn’t the biological child of Jean-Marc and Gisèle Rausch, nor had he helped Gisèle rescue the Jewish orphans. He was one of the orphans.

  An insect landed on the table, and Lisette watched it for a moment. “In the last days of the war, the Nazis went crazy, deporting everyone they thought to be Jewish or those who they thought were harboring the Jews or members of the French Resistance. They raided the orphanage, but all the children were gone.”

  “Where did they go?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Perhaps your father knows.”

  I understood that my grandparents might have been afraid to tell people their son was a Jew after they immigrated, in case there was another war, but why had they harbored the secret for so many years after the fighting ended? They should have been proud of his heritage.

  “What happened to Adeline?” I asked.

  Lisette’s hands trembled as she sipped her tea, the cup clattering against the saucer when she placed it down. Then she nodded slowly, as if she’d decided to trust me with the rest of her secrets. “Adeline was just a baby when Gisèle and I found her. Her mother was Jewish and her parents were deported during the war. Gisèle cared for her at the château during the war.” She scooted back on her chair. “Did you know Philippe tried to marry Gisèle?”

  I shook my head.

  “She refused, but Philippe was deeply in debt and he needed the Duchant property to maintain his lifestyle. After he took the life of Vicomte Duchant, he determined to kill both Gisèle and her brother so the château would be his.” She paused. “Have you heard of the Milice?”

  Again I shook my head, feeling foolish for knowing so little about what Mémé had faced. And for being frustrated at her for not telling me what happened.

  “The Milice were the French version of the Gestapo and they were a nasty bunch. Philippe joined them during the war and began to research Gisèle’s story. He found out that Jean-Marc Rausch, the man she’d said she married, had been fighting in northern France on their wedding day. He tried to deport Gisèle before the Allied troops freed Saint-Lô, but she ran away. And she left Adeline in my care.”

  “Mémé thought you’d been deported—”

  “At the time, all I knew was that she was gone and Philippe was at my apartment. I had known him from before, back when he visited the château . . .” When she paused, I told her I understood. She didn’t need to tell me more. “No one in Saint-Lô knew he was with the Milice except me. Philippe knew that the Germans would be gone soon and he feared the French would send him to prison when they found out about his role. He had me arrested, but he kept something—someone—for when I returned.”

  I shivered. “Adeline.”

  “She was collateral for my silence.” She looked down at her hands. “Philippe’s mother died soon after the war. He moved into the château, and I went to Paris with Adeline. For almost seventy years, I guarded his secret and he guarded mine.”

  I glanced out the window. “Monique’s mother was Adeline.”

  “I changed her name back to Louise,” she said. “She knew her biological parents were killed during the war, but she didn’t know that her mother was Jewish. The Germans had already attacked our country twice. I wanted to protect her, in case they returned again.”

  “What happened to Louise?” I asked.

  Lisette smiled. “She grew up in Paris and trained to be a nurse for the Red Cross. In 1966, she married a fine man. A doctor. They had five children who decided they wanted to change the world in their own way.”

  “You never married?”

  “The only man I ever wanted to marry was killed in the war,” she said. “But my friends in Paris thought I was a widow.”

  I reached for my cup and took a long sip of the tepid tea. “Isabelle said the government gave you the cottage.”

  She nodded. “The children of deported Jews began receiving compensation from the government ten years ago. By that time, Louise had passed away and I didn’t want money, so I asked them for the cottage where her parents had lived before the war. No one had lived in it since 1942, and I think the local officials were pleased to have someone renovate it. I was pleased that my grandchildren and great-grandchildren could learn a bit of Louise’s story.”

  My phone beeped and I saw a text from Riley. It was a photo, he said, that Benjamin Tendler had emailed to him. A picture of Benjamin and his friend Josef Milch.

  I stared at the two men in uniform, standing in front of the hedgerows. All my life I’d been told that Henri Sauver was a French soldier, a resister of the Germans, but as I stared at the photo of the German officer next to Benjamin, there was no denying the truth. My grandfather had served Hitler in the war.

  What would have happened if my grandparents’ American neighbors found out that Henri had been an officer in the Wehrmacht? And that his son, my father, was a Jewish orphan?

  They had to guard their secret.

/>   I texted Riley back, asking him to wait to finish the documentary. I wasn’t afraid to let the world know my father’s family was Jewish, but I was horrified to tell anyone that the grandpa I loved had been a Nazi.

  Chapter 61

  Josef collapsed on a pew in the chapelle. He’d been shot in the shoulder, the blood seeping through the American bandages. As one of Eddie’s friends worked on him, Gisèle wondered silently if the Americans had been the ones to shoot him as well.

  “We have to take him to a hospital in London,” the man said.

  She knelt beside Josef, taking his hand. She couldn’t lose him too.

  He kissed her hand. “I’m not going to leave you.”

  At one time she couldn’t imagine loving a German officer, but she loved Josef Milch with all of her heart. She loved him for the way he cared about the Jewish children, for the way he served under an evil man in order to protect his mother, for the way he fanned an ember of warm light for those trapped in the darkness, for risking his life to save her.

  “Well, I was going to ask you to marry me,” Eddie said from behind her. “But a man knows when he’s been defeated.”

  She looked back at the American pilot through her tears. “You’ll make someone a fine husband, Eddie.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe after this war is over.”

  She squeezed Josef’s hand. “The Allied soldiers are taking the children to London.”

  Flak echoed outside the chapelle and she heard a bomb explode nearby. She leaned closer to Josef. “I must find Lisette and Adeline before Philippe does.”

  He shook his head. “They are already gone.”

  “But where—”

  “Benjamin said they’d been taken to the trains.”

  Dear God. She felt as if she would be sick. “They’re deporting Adeline?”

  “I’m so sorry, Gisèle.”

  She looked toward the door. “We must get to the trains.”

  “It’s too late.”

  She found Eddie’s eyes again, hoping he could find Adeline and Lisette as he had Josef, but all she saw was remorse in his gaze. “The Germans still control the train station.”

  She shivered. “We can’t leave her and Lisette.”

  “I have a plane ready to fly you out of here,” Eddie said. “To London.”

  “We must find them first.”

  “The trains already left,” Josef said.

  Her heart felt as if it had shattered.

  Another bomb hit nearby and she heard the terrible crash of a building caving in upon itself. Loneliness pierced the fragments of her heart.

  “It’s only a matter of days before we defeat the Nazis,” Eddie said. “Then you can search for your friends.”

  “I’ll search with you,” Michel said beside her.

  She looked back and forth between Josef and this boy who risked everything to save her. And she realized that she was no longer alone.

  If Josef was right, if the trains had left, they would never be able to find either Lisette or Adeline. At least not now.

  Josef rested his head back against the wooden arm of the pew. “We will find them after the war.”

  Gunfire ricocheted outside her beautiful chapelle, and she didn’t want to move. All this killing, this horror, would it never stop?

  Eddie held her chin in his rough hands, looking her in the eye. “You and Josef must hurry.”

  She pulled Michel close to her. “This boy belongs with us.”

  Another bomb rocked the ground, and Eddie urged all three of them out of the chapelle. “Go quickly.”

  She would pray all the way to London for Lisette and for Adeline. And the moment the fighting was over, she would find both of them.

  — CHAPTER 62 —

  Dad and I spent hours searching through the boxes in his parents’ attic. It seemed my grandparents had kept every piece of memorabilia they’d collected since they reached the United States, along with all of Mémé’s classroom papers, bills, and sixty years’ worth of the Farmers’ Almanac. Rain streaked down the dormer windows of the attic, and my dad and I laughed and cried together as we remembered.

  I thought Dad would ask Riley to stop the documentary when he found out his father was an officer in the Wehrmacht. Instead he called Riley after I flew home from France and thanked him for telling the story of Josef Milch. In Dad’s eyes, Henri Sauver—his father—was a hero.

  Riley’s documentary about the Jewish soldiers was scheduled to air the first of the year, and now he was trying to track down other orphaned children who had been rescued during the war.

  But before he started filming his new documentary, there was another project he wanted to complete first.

  My father opened a file and then he whistled. “Bingo.”

  I scooted over to him and saw a birth certificate for Henri Sauver. Born in Paris. August 8, 1918.

  “Josef must have forged that,” I said.

  Instead of using Milch, he’d changed his German last name to a French one that meant “salvation.”

  There was a marriage license for Gisèle and Henri in the folder, and the birth certificate for Michael Sauver. It slowly occurred to me that Josef had forged my father’s birth information as he had Adeline’s.

  I leaned back against a post. “They never adopted you.”

  “Perhaps not legally,” he said. “But they were my parents.”

  “They should have made it legal . . .”

  My father shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  But it did matter, at least for their case against Stéphane. My grandfather had forged the papers for Dad’s birth, perhaps to bring him to the United States with them, but châteaus in France were passed down through the bloodline of the old families. Even if Josef had the best of intentions, the French courts wouldn’t side with a German officer who had taken one of their children and run away.

  Josef Milch had rescued an entire orphanage of French children and raised one of the orphaned Jews as his own child. But he still should have legally adopted my dad.

  “Look at this,” Dad said.

  I leaned over and saw the other papers in his hands. They were carbon copies of letters, inquiring after Lisette Calvez, André Batier, Nadine Batier, Charlotte Milch, Odette Laval, and Adeline Rausch. I slowly read through the responses to Henri’s letters.

  Lisette Calvez had returned to Paris in May 1945, one letter reported, but Odette Laval had been killed in Paris during the blitzkrieg. Nadine Batier died on a train before she reached Buchenwald, three months before André died. Charlotte Milch was killed in the gas chamber at Dachau. And according to the last letter from the French government, they had found no record of a child named Adeline Rausch.

  My grandparents hadn’t forgotten those they loved, the people they had left behind. They’d found out what happened to everyone except Adeline. No wonder that, in these years when memories blurred, my grandmother thought Adeline was still lost in the trees.

  “Chloe!” Marissa shouted from the base of the stairs, and I hurried down to my best friend. Her hair was tied back in a knot, and the apron she wore over her jeans and T-shirt was coated with flour. She held out my cell phone and I saw two missed calls from Riley.

  “Do you know what happened?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” she said with a laugh. “Your mom is trying to show me how to make a lemon soufflé.”

  As Dad and I worked, Marissa and my mother had been inspired to concoct all sorts of French desserts in Mémé’s kitchen.

  I called Riley back.

  “Turn on your TV,” he said.

  “Are you certain?”

  He sighed. “No.”

  I’d been avoiding the television all day, but with Riley on the phone, I finally braved the network news. Red and blue balloons trickled down the screen, and I saw Austin Vale on a stage with both of his parents and his sister, all their arms raised in victory. In the close-up shot, his smile almost stretched across the television screen.r />
  Austin hadn’t just charmed me. He’d charmed the entire Commonwealth of Virginia.

  In that moment, I thanked God for filling the empty places inside me with contentment and peace. I was incredibly grateful to be in my grandparent’s home tonight with people I loved instead of on that stage, forcing a smile alongside the new governor-elect and his dysfunctional family.

  The camera panned across the front of the crowd, and I searched the screen for Vos and Wyatt. I didn’t see Austin’s brother or brother-in-law, but there, two rows back from the front, sat Starla Dedrick, pampered and pressed. She wasn’t smiling.

  “Are you okay?” Riley asked.

  “I’m relieved,” I said, muting the volume on the TV. “Immensely.”

  “No regrets,” he asked, part question and part statement.

  Marissa and my mother laughed in the kitchen. “Not a single one.”

  “I was thinking . . . ,” he said.

  “Thinking about what?”

  “Thinking that I would like to come back to Virginia soon.”

  My stomach fluttered. “I’m sure Mémé would love to see you again.”

  “Yes, well . . .” He paused. “I want to visit her, of course, but then, I wondered if I could come down to Richmond to spend time with you, or better yet . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I was thinking you might want to come up here and meet Abigail.”

  I sat on the bottom step. Riley’s relationship with his parents was slowly mending, and it seemed he’d begun to forgive himself for his selfishness in the past. He hadn’t known his daughter was alive, but the guilt for encouraging his girlfriend to abort their daughter had turned into guilt for abandoning her.

  Even though Abigail was too young to hear the entire story, Riley had begged her forgiveness for missing the first eleven years of her life. Their reunion had been bumpy, he said, but Abigail was slowly beginning to forgive him.

  “Or we could all meet in France,” he said, and I could hear his smile.

  “Why are you going to France?”

  “Lisette wants me to do an interview with her about Philippe Borde and the undercover work of the Milice.”