They’d intended to leave at dawn, but her vision blurred with exhaustion. She wouldn’t allow Pascal to reciprocate the pleasure she’d given him when they returned to their room. Together they made up the bed with fresh sheets she’d found in a closet, and tumbled into an exhausted heap, her head pillowed on his chest.
She slept until the afternoon. This time, Pascal woke her with aromatic coffee and rolls and an omelette on a tray. Unshaven, wearing a severely crumpled shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and with his bruised arm all the colors of the rainbow, he still looked delicious enough to make her mouth water. She tasted raspberry jam on his lips.
“Café au lait,” he said, placing a cup into her hand. He ripped a roll apart and buttered it for her. “The trains are running. Not often, but perhaps the train would be better than the motorcar. We can get to Le Havre by way of Rouen.”
Lucilla swallowed coffee and closed her eyes for a moment, in bliss at the smooth sweet milkiness. “You don’t have to go with me,” she said. “I could leave from Brest, or Dieppe.”
“With a great deal more trouble, and knowing no one at those ports,” he said, putting down her roll and picking up another for himself. He paused, with the bread held in one long-fingered hand. “You don’t want my help?”
“I don’t want you to feel you have to take care of me,” she said.
“We have had this discussion before,” he noted. “We have fucked, and now you wish to part? Have you considered my faults and taken me in dislike? Because I know you aren’t in the least foolish, and I can think of no other reason. What is the point of, of rabbiting across France alone—”
“Haring off,” she said. “Not rabbiting. I can take care of myself.”
He flicked his hand dismissively. “You do not need to prove to me that you are capable of taking care of yourself. Truly, do you want me to go away?”
His jaw was tight, and his brows drawn. Lucilla remembered tracing her fingers along the lines of his eyebrows in the night. “No.” She looked down into her coffee cup.
“Good, then we will stop this pointless arguing. We go to Le Havre, and my oncle Marius will find a berth for you. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said, ripping apart his buttered roll and stuffing half of it into his mouth.
Lucilla drained her coffee and cut herself a bit of omelette. It was dense with soft cheese and thin ham and fine herbs. For the next several minutes, they ate in silence. When she emerged from her troubled thoughts and glanced at Pascal, he was watching her, his fork lax in his hand.
She said, “It’s very good of you to offer your help, and your family’s.”
“You are welcome,” he said. He poked at the omelette with his fork. “I am not at all gracious. I do this because I’m selfish. I wish you to be safe. I would be unhappy if you were not.”
Lucilla swallowed the lump in her throat. His gaze burned straight through her. “When does the train depart for Rouen?”
The posted train schedule was overly optimistic, but the trains were running. One had only to be patient amid the tense, unusually large crowds. They bought tickets and drank coffee at the station as the sun set. Lucilla bought a pack of cards from an enterprising vendor and taught Pascal to play All Fives while they sat crammed onto a bench near the departures board. The snap of their cards vanished in the noisy clack of numbers being constantly changed on the board and the low roar of hundreds of conversations.
On the crowded train, Pascal used his long legs to secure seats for both of them, and for all the ride to Rouen, though she’d intended to converse, Lucilla dozed with her head on his shoulder, waking only when he waved a sandwich beneath her nose sometime after midnight. The paper-thin slices of ham and dark mustard might as well have been paper, for all she tasted; the fizzy lemonade burned in her stomach, which was uneasy with nerves.
Pascal poked the crumpled sandwich paper into a pocket on the outside of his rucksack. “Sleep,” he said, his voice rough. “I will wake you at Le Havre.”
“It’s your turn to sleep,” she said. “I can play Patience.”
“I’m not tired,” he said. A moment passed, then he touched her cheek, tracing the shape of her cheekbone. Lucilla shivered. He said, sounding angry, “I would go with you if I could.”
“I know you must stay here.”
“I could leave. I have lived in England before.”
“You will go back to the army,” she said. “I understand that you must. Just as I will do what I must.”
Scowling, he turned his head toward the window. Lucilla slipped her arm into his and laced their fingers together, not caring if anyone saw. She would never see these people again. His hand tightened painfully. He did not speak again. Lucilla closed her eyes and fell into shallow, chaotic dreams.
Despite the early hour of their arrival, Le Havre was even more overwhelmed with travelers than the train station had been. She heard English spoken more than once, fragments carried to her on waves of the crowd’s ocean. Have the tickets?…Where’s Teddy? I told you to watch…leaves on the hour, but I don’t believe…what shall we do…hold the bags…
Lucilla was glad enough to cling to Pascal with one hand and to her carpetbag with the other. She was gladder still when he led her away from the mobbed station and through a series of small side streets to his uncle’s house, a white two-story cottage wedged tightly in a row of similar homes, each one featuring a different array of flowers in front. Pascal introduced her as a chemist and colleague, which garnered baffled looks from his uncle, aunt and three female cousins, but she was still offered kisses on both cheeks and fresh coffee and croissants and a chance to freshen up. She scrubbed her face and the back of her neck roughly with a cloth, hoping to wake up before she had to be polite to strangers.
Lucilla spoke French with some facility and understood it better, but their accents baffled her unless they spoke very slowly, so she smiled and nodded as often as she could. Pascal’s accent was the same, she noted, as he explained her needs to his uncle with a number of expressive hand gestures. His uncle departed soon after reassuring her that a berth would be easy to obtain, for him at least. Lucilla would have given him money for bribes, but he assured her it was not necessary; he was calling in favors.
Her lack of proper sleep had left her in a hazy, numb state. When one of the cousins took her by the arm and led her upstairs to a cramped loft, she was only barely aware of having her shoes unhooked for her as she drifted off to sleep, fully clothed and atop the coverlet.
“Lucilla,” Pascal said.
She patted the mattress next to her, but he wasn’t there. She rolled over and reached for him; he captured her hand and brought it to his lips. She shivered all through the center of her body, waking into a rush of sensual awareness. What was she to do without him?
He said, “You must get up. Your ship leaves in an hour.”
“What time is it?”
“Nearly six.” Pascal tugged, and she sat up, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed in a tangle of crumpled skirt and petticoats. She spotted her stockings draped tidily over the fireplace screen, her shoes set beneath. “I’ll go with you to the dock,” he said in a tone that permitted no argument. “My aunt has made you sandwiches. She is sorry she could not brush out your clothing for you.”
“It’s too late for mere brushing to do any good. Please thank her for me,” Lucilla said. “I need to wash my face.”
Pascal bent and kissed her, briefly but not chastely. “Come downstairs when you’re ready to go.”
Lucilla barely had time to thank her hosts before, smiling, they bustled her and Pascal out the door. He walked quickly, this time carrying her carpetbag for her while she kept her hand around his biceps, careful not to stray toward his bruises, which he had not shown to his family.
“You’ll see your father, won’t you?” she asked.
“After you’ve gone,” he said. He led her past a boatbuilder’s shed and toward a row of ships, their ra
ilings crowded with passengers. “This one,” he said, and stopped at the foot of the gangway.
“Already,” she said, foolishly.
He set down her carpetbag, took off his hat and dug in his jacket pocket. He held up three wrapped chocolates, then slipped them into her skirt pocket with a stealthy caress. “I will find you when this war is ended.”
Lucilla tipped up her chin, trying to send her sudden impending tears back into her head. She wasn’t so brave when it came down to it. She wanted to fling herself into his arms and beg him never to leave her, like someone in a cheap novel. “I’ve enjoyed our time together. I’ll miss you.”
“Don’t speak as if you’ll never see me again.” Pascal ducked beneath her hat brim and kissed her, long and lusciously. Her knees turned to water, and she clutched at his jacket until he pulled away and slapped his hat back on his head. “Au revoir.”
“Goodbye,” she said. She picked up her carpetbag and turned away. All the long walk up the gangplank, she did not look back.
6
ON THE FIFTH DAY AFTER HER ESCAPE FROM THE cage, the wolf decided she had finally outrun all pursuit. She stopped to lick at the dried blood on her wounded shoulder before she slept, to allow herself to heal. She waited for twilight that evening before she moved on, and did the same on many subsequent nights, covering perhaps twenty kilometers without ceasing her steady lope, unless she found water; then she would stop to drink and clean herself. Traveling as she did through fields of grain and vegetables, devouring field mice, only clean dirt clung to her pelage’s stiff hair, but she had become fastidious since her escape.
She not only swam in any suitable water she encountered, but rolled vigorously in sand or against rough rocks, whatever she could find. The stench of him lingered, no matter what she did, and to the wolf an illusory stink was as real as the ground beneath her paws. She took to scrubbing her muzzle in the grass when the taint overpowered her. That helped, or at least provided a distraction from her mother’s never-ceasing voice in her mind: “You must not attack a human. It’s forbidden. Forbidden. Forbidden.”
The weather grew steadily warmer and the days longer. The farther she ran, the more her mother’s voice faded, submerged in the wolf’s mundane concerns. The air of freedom smelled sweet as a fresh kill.
Only once did memory return. Weary of hunting mouthfuls of mouse, one evening she hunted hare, successfully predicting its zigzag dash and seizing its quivering body in her jaws. Blood spurted into her mouth, over her tongue, and it was a man’s blood flowing down, soaking her ruff as she gripped his hip in panic and anger, too weak and fearful to let go and rip instead at his tender belly. The shock of memory almost forced her to change. When she came back to herself, she found the hare’s mangled corpse lying at her feet, but could not summon any appetite for it. She left it for the smaller predators of the fields and went hungry that night, running until she forgot all but the raw-rubbed skin on the bottom of her paws.
After dawn each day, she denned in hedges or ditches, nuzzling her way beneath brush and leaves or whatever cover she could locate. This might have been easier with human hands, but she was reluctant to change, lest anyone see her. And…she did not want to see her human form again. Not yet. It didn’t matter that she bore no scars. That form was bizarre to her, unlikely, and, oddly, she felt as if it had betrayed her. Absurd, when as a human she was also herself; but as a wolf she had never cowered in quite the same way, or yielded to dominance. Her human form was small, pale, weak. It had nothing to offer her today, or tomorrow, or any day after that. Besides, when in wolf form, it was difficult to think too many days ahead. As far as she was concerned, she might remain on four legs forever. So long as she reached home, what did it matter which form she held? This one was as good as any other.
When the full moon came, she dared not run. She heard her mother’s voice again, sensed her mother’s human hands on her puppy fur as she gently told tales of the wolves who’d gone out in the light of the moon, been seen, and been killed.
“You must hide, little one. Hide when the light is too bright. We are only safe here, on our own lands.”
She denned on the edges of a forest, too skittish to go deeper into the dense, cagelike trees and too afraid to lie in the open without concealment. She tried to sleep the night through, to pass the time, but sleep came only in shallow snatches, her legs twitching as if to continue running, so she woke even more weary than she’d been before. At dawn, she found water, then fell truly asleep.
Perhaps her body sensed the trees close around her. She dreamed of being held immobile in a wooden chute, claws scrabbling frantically at the floor while bullets slammed into her haunches, bursts of numbness blossoming into hot, ripping agony. She snarled and yelped, trying to curl in on herself, but there was no refuge, and her blood slowly soaked through the layers of her golden pelage, her strangled whimpers of pain erupting into howls that wrenched and tore into human screams. In her dreams, the change was pain like snapping bones and she jolted into another place, another time. She heard her leg bone creak and twist and pop while she fought uselessly against crisscrossing, pinching leather straps, growling through her bound, bleeding muzzle, while her captor cursed her and smacked her nose, annoyed that she would not hold still. Across the room, the others watched and growled.
She could not bear to sleep among the trees after that endless night. She trusted cornfields, open and predictable, to hide her from view, but sometimes even the spaced green rows seemed to whisper behind her and close in over her head, leaving her no escape but a panicked burst of speed under the white light of the revealing moon.
She had traveled forever. One evening, when she’d slept next to a road, she woke to the stench of tobacco and man. The wise course would be to remain hidden. Instead, she sprang free of concealment and into the road, hackles raised.
He stopped. He spoke.
Her upper lip quivered and lifted, a growl tremoring forth from her belly. Run, she thought. If he ran, she would chase. If he ran, he would be prey. Rage and revulsion fought each other in her belly. She imagined hot blood gushing into her mouth and the slick tenderness of meat beneath his hide.
He spoke again, a question. His voice trembled, but he didn’t move. He smelled old, like—
He would be easy prey if he ran. She could bring him down alone. She did not need to bite. She need only protect herself. But if he tried to bind her…
Hesitantly, he took one step toward her, muttering nonsense. “Good dog…My, you’re large. Where do you live? Good dog, good dog…”
She would not hunt prey that approached her. Also, he stank, but his words weren’t what she’d expected. A thread of familiarity crept into her ears and gradually she identified the feeling.
He spoke Flemish.
She cringed. She was home, might have been home for days. She should be overjoyed, but she cringed. She had almost attacked a fellow Belgian.
The man stopped speaking. He wore sandals. She could smell the mud on his trousers, the wine he’d drunk and the pipe he’d smoked. She smelled no weapon and sensed no bitter tang of contempt. A farmer, probably. Not a threat. Slowly, she backed away, strained whimpers replacing her growl. As soon as she could control herself, she turned tail and fled.
Almost full, the moon glowed fat and brilliant, illuminating her path and clearly marking her retreat to any observers, but she could not stop herself from running, not even retreating to the edge of the road for many kilometers.
Thirst eventually brought her up short. She yawned nervously from a queer sense of pursuit, though the road was deserted. She could smell a village nearby. She could smell bricks and thatch, stoves and fireplaces, and the bodies of humans and horses, dogs and cats, chickens and goats and pigs. Like a promise, she also smelled the first hints of baking bread. Soon it would be dawn.
She staggered to the ditch and there, without quite willing it, she changed form. It must have been a long time since she’d been human. Her muscles wrenche
d painfully as she thrashed, her head slamming into the dirt. She felt as if her spine was being ripped from her back and her yelp twisted to a strangled cry. She fell naked in the ditch, panting, her hair tangled around her, her face streaked with tears of agony.
Growling, she dug her fingers into the dirt and ripped loose handfuls of grass and flowers, flinging them from her with all her strength. That was not enough. She clawed at her own skin, her weak pale flesh, but her ripped nails could not damage enough to release her rage. She tried to change form again, but exhaustion and her disordered feelings prevented her. That final effort sucked the last of her strength and she collapsed to the ground, shaking with a roil of human and animal rage. She could not stop weeping until after the sun rose.
In the gray light of dawn, she crept toward the village, slinking in and out of any cover she found. Dogs silenced and retreated from her at a single commanding look, and a farmer headed for the nearby tobacco fields did not notice a single unmoving shadow behind a rosebush. She crept on bare, callused feet into a laundry shed and there found two dresses, still redolent of their human owner and too large for her slight form. She took one anyway and struggled into it, wrinkling her nose at the human stench, then crept out again. She stole bread from a windowsill, tore off half the loaf, then returned the other half, driven by some distant impulse of human behavior.
Inside the house, people were talking with great vehemence. She had to concentrate to make sense of the human speech at first. They were outraged, and fearful. Some terrible event had taken place.
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