by David Mellon
That whimsical notion ended as soon as his company began the long slog north to Verdun, to be thrown into “the furnace,” as the endless battle had come to be called. There, in a muddy trench that no amount of rumors prepared him for, the reality came crashing down on his head.
It was a miracle that he survived long enough to be spotted by a sergeant who’d been a groundskeeper at the royal estate. It took a week for word to get to Thomas and Augustin, several more for them to track him down.
Neither of them had laid eyes on George for the better part of a year.
They found him on the morning after the French lost the hills of Le Mort-Homme in the battle of Verdun. He was alive, but you would be forgiven for mistaking him for one of the 30,000-odd soldiers who were now scattered like so much gray and khaki on the barbed wire coiled across the once verdant landscape of northern France.
They sat beside him on a pew in the shell of a chapel serving as a makeshift hospital. George stared at them through the remaining lens of his glasses, as if he wasn’t sure who they were. Shaking his head, he laughed to himself a little, before he buried his head against Augustin’s chest and wept like a child.
It took them until dinner time (not that there was any dinner) to convince him to leave the trenches. He argued that the other men were counting on him. After attempting to reason with him, they resorted to blackmail; if he didn’t stop this nonsense and come away with them, they would tell his fellow infantry mates who he really was.
That didn’t work either, so they were forced to resort to the truth, which was clear to anyone not in shock—he had no mates left, almost everyone in his unit had been wiped out the day and night before.
• • •
By the end of 1914, there was nothing left of the telephone and telegraph lines, the railroad tracks, or the roads. They’d all been destroyed by the shelling. The only way for information to travel was by courier: on foot, bicycle, motorcycle, and horseback.
In the trenches, George had experienced this firsthand—insufficient information leading to disaster, thousands of soldiers killed by their own artillery, due to communication breakdowns.
So George proposed a compromise that day. He would drop his disguise as an infantryman, on the condition that he would continue serving as a courier on horseback—a position that he claimed was safer, and that, as a superb horseman, he was better suited for.
Thomas had grown concerned of late about the duchess’s behavior. He argued that George’s presence was needed in Alorainn. But George refused to return. He didn’t care if he was the heir. He was not going to stand by and watch while others fought and died.
Augustin contended that the occupation of courier was only marginally less dangerous than what George had been doing. But recognizing that they weren’t going to be able to talk him out of it, he and Thomas finally relented.
They had a condition of their own, however; this crazy plan could go forward only as long as George didn’t go it alone.
“I’m a better rider than you’re ever going to be,” said Augustin. “Hell, Thomas is a better rider.”
Once the deal had been struck, they picked up his pack and took him away to recover from his wounds, as much as could be. In a little hotel outside Nancy they waited. Uncle Andre had lunch with General Foch, and called in a few favors. Before a month passed, they had horses and kits sent up from home. No one ever said being royalty didn’t have its advantages.
The only remaining hurdle was the constitution of Alorainn.
Fortunately the duchess was surprisingly cooperative. It kept George away from home, which was entirely to her liking.
• • •
As Augustin had predicted, the occupation of messenger was, in its way, as dangerous as the trenches. After two and a half years in the saddle, they’d had more close calls than they cared to remember. It was a miracle that all three of them were still alive.
Augustin was an excellent horseman but that didn’t keep him from having his horse shot from beneath him on their second day out. It was only George that kept him from packing up and leaving when he had to put the horse down in the middle of a muddy field.
Being a cousin to George, Augustin had known him since they were both eight. But the first time he had paid him any mind was several years later, at the party to announce George’s father’s betrothal to Johanna. Augustin and George spent the afternoon smashing all the windows out of an old house on an adjacent property. They were severely punished, and had been partners in crime ever since.
Augustin was, as many men are, in possession of a multitude of acquaintances. But he had few real friends. He could afford to take most things for granted—his family had more money than God. But, though he’d never been exactly sure why George liked him, he never took George’s friendship for granted.
If anyone could claim to have known George longer than Augustin, it was Thomas. They’d been together since they were in diapers.
Thomas’s mother had been lady in waiting for George’s mother, until the duchess’s death. It was only natural, when George came of age and Thomas returned from school at the abbey, that Thomas officially become valet to the heir. Naturally, since Thomas had been taking care of George, in one way or another, pretty much his whole life.
As treacherous as that task was in the midst of a war, in some ways it was easier to protect George from enemy soldiers, hunger, and trench foot than from himself. The balancing act between being his friend and being his valet had gotten to be nearly impossible in the few years before the war. More and more of Thomas’s day had been spent worrying about whether George had wrapped an automobile around a tree or managed to drink himself to death.
So, in some ways, as horrible as everything was (and the war was horrendous beyond words, the sights they saw, the hardship they experienced) and though they complained endlessly about the mud, the food, the heat, the cold, and the fleas, and talked ceaselessly of the war being over and done, and returning to their previous lives . . . truth be told, though no one ever said it out loud, the three of them wouldn’t have missed it.
• • •
One might have thought that the subject of the beautiful brown-skinned girl who had appeared in Alorainn for a few brief moments, nearly four and a half years earlier, would be long spent. Augustin had hardly laid eyes on the young woman.
But, much as it was in the trenches, a day in the life of a courier swung between heart-stopping terror and utter incessant boredom. Though constantly on their guard—trouble could arise in a heartbeat—most of the time they sat in their saddles and watched the landscape pass. And they talked. And of all the topics that arose, the one that appeared with the most regularity was Adi.
• • •
For Augustin, it was largely about the riddles. It would have been hard to devise a better, longer-lasting entertainment for whiling away the hours. They had managed to get another one of them figured out, after Belfort and Ypres. But the last riddle was killing them.
Of course, what really made it so intriguing was the mystery that came along with the young woman herself. It didn’t take much time for Augustin to become as invested as his friends.
Thomas would agree, but for him there was more to it than that, more than just a game and a puzzlement. First of all, Thomas felt he’d lost Adi. If he had been paying more attention, doing his job, she wouldn’t have disappeared. And because of that carelessness, this woman, whom he considered, in many ways, responsible for the positive changes in George, was lost to them.
There was another reason. Though Thomas had a pretty strong sense by this time in his life that women probably weren’t to his taste, the too brief time he’d spent with the girl was the closest he’d ever come to questioning this preference. He’d really liked her, and it was the rare day since she’d gone that he didn’t miss her.
For George, it was even more complicated. Nobody’s fault, perhaps, but his life was altered the day he met her. He was pretty certain the irrespons
ibility and the boozed-out oblivion of those years would never return. But neither would the simplicity or the careless joy. In a way that was now impossible to separate, her appearance was forever entangled with a war and the collapse of the world as he knew it.
There was that.
And there were her beautiful hands curled around her face as she slept that first day in the car seat. The light that shone in her eyes when she was excited. The way her lips trembled when she kissed him that night in the orchard.
He knew Thomas felt guilty, that he held himself responsible for her disappearance. But to George’s thinking, it was all his fault. His fault for not kissing her again. His fault for acting like a witless schoolboy the next day.
For leaving her there.
For a while, that was how he had looked at it. Bemoaning the loss, blaming himself, certain that Adi, if she thought of him at all, probably thought herself well favored to be away from a charming drunkard.
But now, and more and more—especially when he would wake in those early morning hours, when the desolation would roll in—it would come to him: she hadn’t become bored with waiting, or gotten fed up with him and left. Something had happened to her. Something to do with the mystery that twisted tight around her.
This was why, for all these reasons, though any fool would understand that the girl was surely gone and never to be seen again . . . this was why they still pondered that fourth riddle and that point on the map that might tell them where her fabled lost brothers were. And that last riddle, that might, just maybe, lead them to something more.
Chapter 28
November 4, 1918
Adi walked through the doorway into what remained of the kitchen.
There wasn’t much left of the grande maison, only the foyer and a few meters of wall, held together by a bramble of ancient rosebush. The rest of the house was a pile of debris, knocked down years before by artillery.
Pulling her greatcoat tight about her against the November chill, Adi sat herself onto one of the chairs that still had most of its seat intact. In the mornings, when it was quiet, she liked to sit at the big wooden table next to the glassless windows and think. She was close enough to the hospital to hear if anyone yelled for her.
Someone was shouting now. But it wasn’t from the hospital.
Lifting up in her chair, she could make out soldiers, couriers—three of them on two horses, riding into camp from the east, getting a warm welcome from a group of men by the gate. It was too far away to make out the riders’ faces. They must’ve come down from Bazancourt or Rethel, maybe. That couldn’t have been easy.
“Just keep the bandage dry. You’ll be fine.”
Adi looked over to see Doc helping a soldier up the steps from the basement of the hospital. An American from the west. New Mexico, or that other one? Arizona. He was smiling, his arm no longer in a sling.
“Mer-ci, Doc, and bon voyage,” he said. He spotted Adi at the table over at what was left of the kitchen. “You boys keep your heads down up north, hear?” Adi smiled. The soldier gave a wave and made his way back in the direction of the tents.
Doc squinted up at the sky, the light glaring off his dirty glasses. He shuffled over to the maison. “The weather might just cooperate for a day or two.”
He examined the choice of chairs at the table until he found one acceptable. Lowering himself down, he leaned back against the wall.
• • •
The immovable front had finally moved. For the first time in four and a half years, armies were on the march again.
Not that the Germans had made it easy. Just a few months before, small bands of special forces outfitted with automatic rifles and flame throwers had swept through the lines, reinforced by a moving barrage of artillery. The British 5th Army had nearly broken. For the second time in four years, the Germans had come within a few kilometers of marching down the boulevards of Paris.
But they had neither the men nor the resources to support this tactic for long. The assault collapsed upon itself and the Allies rushed into the breach. The Americans had finally joined the fight. The Austro-Hungarian Empire had surrendered, abandoning its alliance with Germany. Troops were deserting. German cities were dying of starvation and the Spanish flu. Baron von Richthofen, “The Red Baron,” had been shot down. They had no hope now of winning the war. They struggled only to better their bargaining position for an armistice that was, now, as inevitable as the sunrise.
This didn’t mean much to Doc and Adi. They were presently eighty kilometers from the front, but that didn’t keep a steady tide of wounded from pouring in every day. Tomorrow, their rotation in this rear-area hospital was done. It was back to the front.
• • •
Adi looked at Doc for a moment, then reached over and took his glasses from his nose. It was a wonder he could see through them, speckled as they were with spots of dried blood and Lord knows what else. Like the rest of his uniform. Not that hers was much cleaner.
She pulled out her handkerchief, exhaled on the lenses, and began wiping them.
Doc took the opportunity to rub his filthy hands across his face. He turned and looked out the window. From where they were sitting one could see the sky and a distant curve of the Vesle River. Beyond that, a bit of Reims Cathedral rose up through the haze. You could almost make believe that the city wasn’t a shell-blasted ruin.
“When I was growing up,” said Doc, “some child drowned in that river every year. It’s like glass on the surface, but the current was fierce.”
She handed him his glasses. Doc put them on, smudging the lenses in the process.
“We used to, my family, used to come here every August when we were kids. About a half-mile up river, where my cousins used to live.”
Adi leaned her chin on her hand to listen. It wasn’t often that Doc would quit yelling and just talk, rarer still when he might say something about his previous existence. Most of his conversation would lead you to believe he was born an old army medic.
“Right down the way”—he motioned with his hand—“there’d be people in boats, kids swimming, families picnicking.” He laughed. “We made sure my mother never heard about all those people drowning—she’d have never let us go in.”
This sounded like something she recalled Xavier and Xander telling her. That they’d had the same rule with their mother. Or was it their governess? “Always in trouble,” they said. “She never knew the half of it.”
At least that’s what she thought she remembered.
These days it all seemed but a dream, her life before. The only thing real anymore was the never-ending war and the wounded, Doc and Gershom and the others. She was not a young lady at university, as she had once dreamed. Or even a girl with a beau, engaged or married. She was Jean Joseph Goux.
She watched Doc as he tilted his head back and closed his eyes, letting the pale sun warm him.
Pulling the watch up from inside her coat, she laid it on the table. She hardly felt wobbly anymore to lose contact with it. Probably that strange reaction had just been her imagination anyway.
But it had gotten harder for her to look at the thing, this reminder of her failure. To ruminate on the boys’ whereabouts was to invite an almost paralyzing anxiety. She had dwelled upon the mystery until her head ached, till she thought she would go mad. She never got close to an answer. Who was he? Why had he done these things to them? Why had he saved her life? If indeed he had saved her. And been there in the middle of a battle? The further away the memory got, the surer she was that it was a result of having her head banged on the floor.
She slid a fingernail under the lid and pulled it open. The boys stared out at her, their appearance never-changing, no matter how much time passed.
She had no idea what she looked like these days. There weren’t a lot of mirrors in trenches—nor in the hospital, for that matter. The wounded didn’t need reminding of what they’d lost. Nor did she. It terrified her to think of how little of herself might still be recogni
zable. Just as well, she thought. That silly girl, off to Paris, to live her life in splendid isolation, discarding her brothers like a pair of shoes she no longer fancied.
She flipped the watch face around. The first three squares on the left were now empty.
It still took too long, but she had gotten better at figuring the time. Thirty-six hundred seconds in an hour, 86,400 in a day, 604,800 in a week. A meager 859,429 seconds was all that was remaining. She watched as they ticked away: 7, 6, 5 . . .
Less than seven days remained. She tried to breathe through the tightness that gripped her chest.
Three of the riddles were deciphered. That was to say, only one more had been added to the Belfort and Ypres that George and Thomas had come up with. The third one was solved a year or so after she became Jean Joseph Goux and started living in holes in the ground.
That one she owed to Gershom Yachov and a soldier from Besançon.
• • •
She’d come back to the infirmary one night from her visit to the latrines. She looked over to see that a couple of stretcher bearers were sitting in the corner, looking guilty. Gershom sat between them holding the watch open in his hand, not looking the slightest bit guilty.
“Your cockamamie watch?” he said. “Who made this? And what do the riddles mean?”
“Give it back, Gershom,” Doc rumbled from his chair where he was napping. Adi grabbed the watch back in astonishment and held her hands wide to ask how he’d managed to lift it from her.
Gershom grinned. “I was beginning to think you weren’t gonna notice. I’ve had it since we were on the motorbikes this afternoon.”
According to rumor, Gershom Yachov, before he found his way into the army, was something of a gonif, which, he explained with a crooked grin, was Yiddish for “thief.”
No one knew where he came from. No one was sure he had ever even signed up. He had simply been around one day when Doc needed a driver. He was fearless behind the wheel and brilliant at procuring supplies, so no one questioned why he would be crazy enough to be there when he didn’t have to be.
