American Duchess

by Karen Harper

  “I might as well be on the moon, I feel so far from you. And I feel overwhelmed.”

  “This is not like you, my love. I know times are frightening, but we must hang on. You are a strong woman—have always been strong.”

  “I do not mean to complain. I want to support you and I know you are under great strain. But, frankly, I just pray the French generals in command of the borders are not like that beastly General Fuisse! I hope they are more like my Jacques!”

  “This is a nightmare, I agree. The threat of war . . . our being apart when we were apart for so long. I swear to you I will see you soon, even if briefly. Just pray that the lines will hold. We lived through separation once and built a life together. If the château goes to the state for now—”

  “That is one thing, but again, I say, not the hospital!”

  “I know. I will inquire. I will even beard old Fuisse in his den if I must, the old— Well, enough said. Enough said, except for how much I miss you and love you. Darling, as I said, if you ever change your mind and want to go to England or even home to America—”

  “You are here and that makes France my home.”

  “Then, someday, I swear to you, I will make America my home, too—you wait and see.”

  “That is all I am doing here. I wait to see what will happen to these dear people in my care and I wait to see you.”

  “I will always—” he said and then we were cut off. The line absolutely went dead. I tried to tell myself that was not an omen.

  I SLEPT FITFULLY now, even in my exhaustion. Sometimes I dreamed we were under attack as in London. It was dark in the cellar. Where was Jacques? Was he flying in the night sky without me? Despite my weak hearing, I sometimes was certain I heard guns booming, but it was just the wind rattling a shutter or a spring thunderstorm. I wore myself down, caring for the children, visiting the villagers, tiring myself so that I could manage to get some sleep.

  Sometimes I lay awake for hours before dawn. Jacques’s telephone calls were scarce now. He said he would be home soon, but when? Perhaps never again if the Germans attacked or broke through the French lines.

  Dawn came slowly on a day that should have been so pretty. I tried to reckon the date, it was May 16, 1940, I figured. Yes, that is right, because Winston had been prime minister of England for just six days.

  I rolled over and curled into a ball on Jacques’s side of the bed. I ached from lifting buckets and patients at the hospital. Winston had said that the French trench warfare would never stop the Germans and their Wehrmacht war machine this time. Now, finally, he had been given the power to try to stop them. Winston, like a third brother to me, one who had been closer than my real ones, had said England must be ready to fight, and I knew so must we all.

  I heard the door to my room open. A shaft of light leaped across my face. Half asleep at first, I instantly dreamed Jacques had come home to me. Then I feared the Germans had come for me. I sat bolt upright in bed.

  “Madame, news!” my maid’s voice cut through my half-waking state. “The German invasion through Belgium is progressing with hardly a shot being fired! It is on the radio, and Katrine has come to tell you so! They will try to cross our French lines soon, madame. Oh, what shall we do? Will soldiers be here soon, wounded ones like you said or the enemy?”

  Or refugees as Jacques and the general had said?

  “I am getting up to make some telephone calls,” I told her, sounding quite in command as I threw off my mussed covers and swung my feet out of bed. I always had my clothes laid out nearby, and I scrambled into them. “Feed Katrine breakfast and send her back home,” I ordered. “As soon as I can, I will pack a small suitcase of clothes and shoes in case I have to head south to find a place for the children. You should do the same—we may have to flee.”

  “Flee, madame? But to where and how?”

  Exactly, I thought. Doom and disaster could soon be on our doorstep.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The nightmare worsened. The Nazis’ blitzkrieg of planes, tanks, and artillery had been mostly unopposed and they’d quickly taken over Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. A flood of refugees from Belgium and the French eastern provinces fled past our gates. First came the motorcars of the wealthy, then the wagons of rural folks, then bicyclists, then those walking. From the moment the farm families, traveling in wagons, began to arrive, and knowing that they’d left their crops and livestock behind, I had canteens set up along the road where people could get fresh water, eat bread with jam, and rest.

  “Merci, madame,” I heard over and over as I gave orders to my château staff and some villagers who came to help. I knew I was making my two, elderly bodyguards nervous as I moved quickly from person to person, but at least I was not worried for myself now. Seeing the plight of others made me temporarily forget my situation, though my prayers that Jacques would come home soon, at least for a visit, never ceased.

  “They are coming, the Huns, madame,” one distraught, disheveled woman told me. “They take everything, even kill the animals and burn the crops. Cut down trees in the orchards, too.”

  I overheard a young man with a very pregnant wife and a young child in arms tell one of my guards, whom he thought was my father, “The Germans, they make everywhere they go a no-man’s-land by setting explosive mines. One false step—boom! My brother lost a leg then his life. We had to leave.”

  A wagon drawn by four beautiful Percherons pulled up with household goods piled high. A bearded man drove with a woman in an old-fashioned bonnet sitting next to him. Perched atop bundles of clothing and what looked to be sacks of flour and grain sat an old woman wearing black, tied in a rocking chair that was secured to the sacks.

  No doubt her life as she knew it was over. I thought of Mrs. Prattley and of Jacques’s great-aunt who had presided over the Balsans’ lovely home the day I first met the family. I had thought I had worries and problems then.

  “Madame,” a young boy said and tugged at the apron I wore over my dress. “My papa, he is so angry with me for bringing these pets of mine along. He says we cannot eat them so I must let them go. But can they stay here, please? Does your house have a pond? I will come back for them later.”

  He opened a battered cardboard box and within were four soft, golden ducklings. They made little chirping sounds and looked so frenzied, so trapped. Like all of us now.

  “I have fountains and a moat, and I promise you I will put them there,” I assured him with a squeeze of his shoulder.

  Like so many of the others, tears wet his cheeks. “I hope you do not like duck soup,” he said. He gave me a little bow as if I were royalty. He thrust the box into my hands, sniffed hard, then hurried off to climb into a waiting wagon.

  At night, on the grass beside the road through the village, we put out lanterns and mattresses we hauled from the château. We had been waiting for wounded French soldiers, who had not yet materialized. We had asked so many of the refugees for news of how our troops were doing, but they did not know. They only knew that there was no French border with Belgium anymore and the Germans were coming.

  Before I went back to the château to try to sleep for several hours, I checked again on a young woman who had appeared on the road alone. At first I had thought she was deaf or mute, for she just stared off into space, seeing something—or nothing. But this time, her eyes sought mine, so I sat on the grass next to her narrow mattress and took her hand in the wan lantern light. Her eyes looked hollow—haunted. For the first time I was certain she was neither mute nor retarded, perhaps just shattered by all this.

  “You are safe here tonight,” I assured her. “Would you like some water or tea? In the morning, you can go on. Do you have family somewhere?”

  “Did. Two children.”

  “And you were separated from them?”

  “Yes. Forever.”

  “Oh, I am so sorry. You lost them before you set out?”

  “On the road. The Germans—their planes strafing the road near the
tracks, wanting to ruin the railroad line. Both killed, my children. Rosette, she died in my arms and people made me leave them—leave them beside the road because the planes came back again, again . . .”

  She gasped and screwed her eyes tight shut as if she were seeing it all again. I thought she would become hysterical. I wanted to. But she seemed beyond that, beyond everything.

  “Your husband?” I managed to choke out.

  “Gone to a soldier. Lost, do not know, but nothing matters now.”

  She closed her eyes and cried at last, tears squeezing out and running down into her hairline and her ears. I could not imagine the horror, and yet this was just one person, one horrid incident in this huge tragedy that had barely, I feared, begun.

  I sat there, chilled by the night air, holding her hand until I heard one of my guards call out, “Here she is, Colonel! Sitting over here.”

  I snapped alert. I had dozed off in my exhaustion. Had the Germans found me? No, for then I heard a voice I knew, glimpsed the silhouette of a familiar form.

  I lay the poor woman’s hand carefully down. She slept heavily at last. I started to stand but was swept off my feet and lifted in strong arms. Jacques! That poor woman had no one, but my Jacques had come home!

  “I SHOULD HAVE known you would be in the thick of things, even here,” Jacques told me as he bathed in the same tub of water he had insisted I wash in first. I am sure I had resembled a farmwife, someone he had never seen with my loose hair and dirty face.

  “At least some of the parents of patients at the children’s hospital have been coming to get them,” I told him. “That will be fewer we will have to be sure to get safely south. I am so glad you are here to help.”

  I held up a towel for him as he stepped out of the tub. He looked strong as ever, maybe a bit thinner and more muscular. He dried himself off. He seemed well enough fed and not a scratch or new scar on his lean form.

  “How long can you stay?” I asked as he tied the damp towel around his waist, ignoring the pajamas I had laid out on our bed. “Long enough for us to drive south to find a place to evacuate the children, I hope.”

  “Just long enough to follow the orders of my commander, the Ministre de l’Air. It took me hours to get here, as the traffic was nose to tail, and I kept stopping to pick up those who could not walk, if there was room.”

  “But we need to go south as far as we can to find a haven for the patients, then return here to pack them up and evacuate them.”

  “When we go south, you will need to stay south. I have received notice that the German High Command knows where you live, but I am hoping and believing our lines will hold. If not, this trickle of displaced and panicked people will become a deluge, and we cannot buck that, trying to come back up north after we flee south.”

  “It already is a deluge. I have packed a suitcase for myself, so—”

  “Let me see what you have put in it,” he interrupted, his voice stern as he followed me over to the settee where my suitcase sat open. “Too big, too much—and a designer case by Vuitton, no!” he said without so much as touching it. “It needs to have plain clothes, work clothes. Does it?” he asked, lifting out some items. “This dress is too formal, too well made. We are not going to some party, but we are joining the refugees, so I will buy some things for us in the village.”

  “And I thought I was done with people telling me what I must wear!” I exploded before I calmed myself. This was my Jacques, not my mother years ago or the duke. “Sorry,” I said, but I could tell he was not angry.

  “So,” I went on, “you think my luggage will be examined and searched? I am at least going to take one good black dress. What if I need to talk to some magistrate, to finagle a place for the ill children, to convince them I will pay them as soon as I can get some U.S. funds through our Paris bank? And I am going to telephone my brothers to send some funds, if mine are frozen, and pay them back later.”

  “My darling wife,” he said, pulling out a small, silk sack of jewelry I had included, “haven’t you noticed this is not business as usual now?” His voice rose in a scolding, exasperated tone much like mine a moment ago. “And . . . you cannot be caught with this!” he insisted, holding up my French Legion of Honour award by its red velvet neck cord. The gold, white, and blue polished medal glimmered in the light.

  “It is precious to me! I had a good mind to pack yours for safekeeping, too!” Why was he ignoring the needs of the ill children? Of course I wanted to be safe, but the Germans were not here, had not even breeched the French lines Jacques so believed would hold—or did he? He was more than brusque, he was harsh, and that was so unlike him.

  “You are exhausted,” he told me.

  I knew that was true. I was almost swaying on my feet. My shrill voice was not my own.

  He went on more calmly, “I will bury both of our medals in the backyard in a tin box, and we will come back for them when we can. Your good jewelry, too. We need to set out tomorrow. I have orders from the general to keep you safe.”

  “If you mean that beastly General Fuisse, he just wants his hands on the hospital, let alone the château. I am telling you again, and you can tell him and your higher command, that I am willing to turn the château over to French soldiers or refugees, but not the hospital—not yet at least. Jacques, you and I have made decisions together, so you can stop ordering me about like some new recruit. I am afraid your French lines will not hold or your planes stop that horrible Luftwaffe. So I will agree to go sometime soon, but I need to have people ready to evacuate here.”

  “You can argue and try to defy General Fuisse, of course—even me, but there is someone else who is weighing in. Winston was not sure this telegram would get to you here, so he sent it through the chain of French command, and it came to me.”

  He went over to his battered valise and took out a much folded, beige telegram. My hands trembled as I opened it and read: COL J. BALSAN. GET CONS OUT OF FRANCE. STOP. SHE IS ON HIGH LEVEL GERMAN CAPTURE RANSOM LIST. STOP. ENGLISH CHANNEL DANGEROUS. STOP. GO SOUTH, THEN TO U.S. STOP. W. CHURCHILL

  I stared at the words. My heart thudded. All I could manage was to nod.

  “I said we need to set out tomorrow morning,” he told me.

  “Listen to me as well as to Winston, Colonel Balsan! That young woman you saw me with—the Germans killed her children on the road when they were shooting at people from the air to ruin railroad tracks! I will go, but I need just a little more time here, to prepare at least to save the children, especially if the French lines do not hold!”

  He turned and seized me, grabbing my arms, hugging me against his chest. “We have to hold the border! France cannot be crushed again, occupied, used and ruined!”

  I wrapped my arms around him. “We must not fight each other. I do not know what to do without you.”

  “You have done splendidly on your own, and that is so hard—so very hard for me to know, to accept, however much I am proud of you, that you do not need me.”

  I said, “I do. I do!”

  He lifted me and carried me to the bed. He ripped his towel away and pulled back my robe. He was desperate, but I was too. Too strong, too fast, but we crested and clung together afterward, breathing hard.

  “I did not mean to hurt you—ever,” he said. He pulled me tight against him. “We must start south before all this turns worse. Fuisse says we will have the wounded here soon, and he is sending someone to oversee that.”

  “Will that make the château or the village a target, even with strafing and bombs from their planes?”

  “I pray not. Consuelo, we will try to find a place for the children, perhaps at Pau, far south, almost on the Spanish border. But the mission of my heart is to get you away from the Nazis before they get you or us.”

  “Yes, you are in danger, too,” I said as that reality hit me. “They would love to get their filthy hands on a rich Frenchman to ransom, but especially one who trained pilots to help defeat them in the Great War—and now.”

&n
bsp; “But even if we find a place for the children, then how to evacuate them from here to there? Because once I get you out of France and to the United States . . .”

  “Clear to America?” I cried, turning to face him in our twisted sheets. “I cannot leave you!”

  “I am to take you out of the country, get you safe, then return. I made a bargain for that, and we must play by their rules.”

  “But I want you to stay with me!”

  “Then let us work on all that together, yes? But you must do as I say when we set out. We can stay with my brothers as we head south, and then, it depends on where we can go after that, but I swear, I will see you safe in America before I return here. I have contacted your brother Mike to work on getting us a plane to evacuate, but the question is, evacuate from where? So, will you agree to my bargain in all this?”

  “To be with you clear to America? Yes, and I will even help you bury our honor medals and my jewelry. But, please, one more day here to do what I must, stage a mock evacuation, arrange all that for later. But we will be conspicuous if we take the big motorcar.”

  “We will take the old Citroën that sits in the carriage house. I will give you only tomorrow here and then we must go. So we are agreed—a bargain—but my first concern must be you. That has been my own orders to myself for years, only now, the odds are huge.”

  I QUICKLY ARRANGED and staged, with the help of our staff, who did not know Jacques and I would soon be refugees, too, a rehearsal for the evacuation of the hospital. On that last day, for the first time, I realized we were short of foodstuffs and medicines, which had stopped coming into the village. I had already been paying a pretty penny for black market milk—even canned milk—and medicines. Indeed, I was starting to feel like Mother Hubbard in that old Mother Goose nursery rhyme where she went to the cupboard and it was bare. As I glanced at the refugee boy’s ducklings swimming in the moat, I wondered if they would get through the war or end up in some starving soul’s stomach.