The Baker's Secret
Page 25
Emma tried to peer past the officer. “Who is it?”
The soldiers parted, a form stumbled forward. It was Argent, the young professor from the mansion on the bluff. His glasses were gone, his face lacerated on one side. Emma looked beyond, but there was no one else with him.
Though she had never learned his wife’s name, Emma felt the loss like a blow. And the baby, barely a day old. Before she could offer comfort, though, or say anything, the infant mewed in her father’s arms. He was carrying the newborn after all.
“Ha!” Emma cried, clapping her hands once. The soldiers turned to peer at her, and she seemed equally surprised. What was this rush of emotion? Was it actually a glimmer of optimism? In spite of everything, the child was alive.
“Baby,” Mémé said. She scurried to the house’s doorway, waving an arm to invite them inside. “Baby.”
The young professor turned in the direction of that voice, stumbling into the house, and in his weary arms a bundle of warm cloth: the pink-skinned girl whose nappie needed changing, who needed to nurse but would never nurse again, whose exhaustion had overwhelmed all of her other wants so that she slept even though war raged around her, eyes closed as if instead of chaos and violence the world were a quiet nursery.
Although months of conflict remain, at a cost of thousands of lives, this very second is the moment that the war begins to end, the time that the future commences.
The baby girl, Gabrielle, will not grow up with memories of occupation and invasion. Her childhood and adolescence will contain a treasury of hours—with Emma at bedtime, in Odette’s café, playing in the hayloft while Pierre milks his girls—of hearing the story: who survived and how, who outsmarted whom, which people sacrificed and how much.
Their stories were like a cemetery in the mind, naming the dead, mourning what was lost. But they also made a chapel in the imagination, proof that the people were strong enough to endure. Catalog of triumph, relic of redemption; story was souvenir, salve, and salvation.
Gabrielle divined this insight only after the war had ended, however, after the villagers had experienced the merciful tincture of time. On that gusty June night—blood on their clothes, hunger in their bellies, aching in their hearts—the people’s future remained a frightening unknown. Gunfire clattered in the distance, a thudding of mortars. Soldiers prepared for battle in the dark. The smell of gunpowder arrived on the wind.
Who should swagger into the barnyard just then, but Pirate. Feathers scorched and disheveled, he strutted before the soldiers undaunted, crowing at them in full volume: get out of his barnyard, get away from his roost. The men laughed.
One soldier said something in his language to the captain, who made a firm reply, and the laughter stopped.
“What did he ask?” Emma said.
“If he should shoot him,” Schwartz answered. “I said that scrappy little guy is actually part of what we’re here to save.”
Then he cleared his throat and called orders. The men assembled, checking their equipment one last time. Captain Schwartz turned to Emma. “Here. Something to remember us by.” He handed her a hard square of foil.
“As if I’m likely to forget,” she answered.
“Okay, men,” the captain shouted. “Let’s march.” He strode through the barnyard door, soldiers filing behind him, their bodies hunched and rifles raised.
After the last of them had passed beyond the eastern well, into the hedgerow and out of sight, Emma found herself standing alone. Hell on earth continued all around: flames on the horizon, bombers snarling overhead, people inside the house awaiting her help. But for that brief interval the barnyard was an oasis, a private moment of calm. It felt vaguely familiar, as if from a long, long time ago.
Here was the place Philippe would return to, and bit by bit recover with the help of a woman as steady as rock, and find himself healed by the joyous, exhausting duties of fathering. Here was the place that the future lived.
With her good hand Emma unwrapped the foil around the captain’s gift. Chocolate, a fat square of it, and she immediately bit off a chunk. After all those years of eating sparely, she felt her mouth flooded with flavor: rich, milky, sweet.
The taste of hope.
Acknowledgments
No exact undisputed tally exists, but credible estimates say that the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, cost the lives of more than 4,400 Allied soldiers. The United States Cemetery and Memorial at Omaha Beach, final resting place for American war dead from the overall Normandy campaign, holds 9,387 graves.
Those battles also took the lives of an estimated fifty thousand French men and women.
Many excellent books and films explore this heroism, and I was most inspired by D-Day by Stephen E. Ambrose; D-Day Through French Eyes by Mary Louise Roberts; and D-Day Normandy (a photographic essay on the invasion) by Donald M. Goldstein, Katherine V. Dillon, and J. Michael Wenger.
My friend Marcia DeSanctis, author of 100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go (which is infinitely more than a travel book), insisted that I hire Claire Lesourd as a guide in Normandy. It proved to be an excellent suggestion. Claire turned out to be a walking encyclopedia, bringing me to the villages, beaches, and battlefields where history was made. I am grateful for her knowledge, patience, and help. Kenneth Rendell’s unique Museum of World War II, outside of Boston, contained thousands of artifacts that made the war experience tangible—from Hitler’s uniform to the grappling hook used in the climbing assault on Pointe de Hoc. My sister Casey Kiernan made me aware of that museum as well as the HBO program Band of Brothers. My interview with Ron Hadley, landing-craft commander and veteran of Omaha Beach, was about as humbling a conversation as I’ve ever had.
That interview took place thanks to an introduction by my friend Chris Bohjalian, who continues to help and guide my work with incredible generosity. I am lucky and proud to know him.
The other person who supported this book—from first draft to last, with patience, humor, and wine—is the inimitable Kate Seaver. I am in her debt in many, many ways. Early drafts also benefitted from the wise, clever, and challenging responses of Geoff Gevalt, John Killacky, and Hawk Ostby. I also appreciate the kind help of Peter Heller and Mary Morris, whose works of fiction far surpass mine.
I am especially grateful to the people who brought this novel into being: my trusted agent and friend Ellen Levine, the best ally I can imagine; and my editor and friend Jennifer Brehl, who improved this book from first sentence to last. Thanks too to Mumtaz Mustafa and Leah Carlson-Stanisic, for designing a beautiful book.
If there seem to be a lot of names here, it is because so many people helped me bring this idea from imagination to reality. I could not have done it without them.
About the Author
Stephen P. Kiernan spent more than twenty years as a journalist, winning numerous awards before turning to fiction writing. The Baker’s Secret is his third novel.
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Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
the baker’s secret. Copyright © 2017 by Stephen P. Kiernan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or
hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Illustration by mika48/Shutterstock, Inc.
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa. Cover photograph © M. Diggin/Robertstock.com.
first edition
Digital Edition MAY 2017 ISBN: 9780062369604
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-236958-1
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