Treacherous Is the Night

by Anna Lee Huber

  * * *

  Though we didn’t know the exact direction to Emilie’s sister’s house, in a tiny village like Quevy, everyone knew each other, and we were swiftly directed to her cottage. At first, upon seeing the petite woman with frazzled hair and quick, darting eyes, I thought we might have come to the wrong place. She was as different from calm, contained Emilie as could be. But she ushered us inside when I mentioned Rose Moreau, as if worried the trees bordering her home might be listening.

  She gestured us toward chairs at a battered, round table. “Yes, Rose Moreau is my sister,” she confirmed after closing and locking the door.

  Sidney and I exchanged a look as she fluttered about, twitching curtains before joining us at the table.

  “Is she here?” I asked.

  Her eyes immediately narrowed in suspicion. “Who wants to know?”

  “My name is Verity Kent. Though your sister would most likely have known me as Gabrielle Thys.” When this elicited no response from her, I tried something else. “Her priest in Macon told us she left a message for me saying I could find her here.”

  She leaned forward in challenge, unsettling me. “Is that actually what he said?”

  “Well, no. He said I could inquire after her here.”

  Her eyebrows arched, as if anticipating more.

  “And that the hens had come home to roost.” I wasn’t sure how this was pertinent to her, but it seemed to galvanize her into action.

  She jumped up from her chair and crossed the room toward a cupboard. “Did you bring the can, then?”

  I blinked in surprise. “Yes, actually. Though it’s out in the motorcar.”

  She waved her hand at us as she bent forward on her hands and knees to rummage through the items stored in the lower compartment. “Well, go fetch it then.”

  “I’ll go,” Sidney offered, rising to do so.

  I watched the little woman in bemusement. It was only by a stroke of luck that I’d taken the can with me. I’d intended to leave it where I’d found it, but then Madame Ledoq had interrupted us and I’d never removed it from my pocket until we returned to the motorcar.

  Exclaiming in triumph, Madame Moreau’s sister emerged from the depths of the cabinet, brandishing a thick book as if it was the Holy Grail. She dropped it on the table before me with a thunk and then planted her hands on her hips. It was a Bible, and an old one at that, but I had no idea what she expected me to do with it.

  Sidney returned then, looking between us as he passed me the tin can.

  “Are there no further instructions?” I asked.

  “If you are who you say you are, then you’ll know the game as surely as you know your name,” she declared before walking away.

  Scowling in confusion, I studied the can and the Bible. Clearly, I was missing something. Something important.

  “I take it you don’t know what to do?” Sidney inquired.

  “Just . . . give me a moment.”

  Removing the can’s lid, I looked inside again to still find it empty. Should there have been some message inside? Had someone else taken it? Or was the can to be used in a different way?

  I turned it this way and that, searching for random markings. Closer examination showed there were five dented holes in the bottom, but they didn’t follow any discernable pattern I could see. I reached out to flip open the Bible. Perhaps there would be a note or random marking for me to follow.

  But then why did I need the can?

  Huffing in exasperation, I set the can down on the open page of the Bible to glower at it. If this was some coded message, Emilie was certainly going to extremes to keep her location a secret.

  Which in and of itself was peculiar. She was such a straightforward, no-nonsense person. All of this subterfuge was making me uneasy. Either she was extremely wary of someone finding her and uncovering whatever she knew, or she wasn’t the one sending me on this scavenger hunt. But who else knew about the can and the other things?

  “Verity.”

  Hearing the wariness in his voice, I glanced up at Sidney.

  He stood next to the cupboard, holding one of the books from its upper shelves. “I think you should see this.” He held the book in front of me so that I could read the cover.

  “That’s one of Jonathan Fletcher’s novels.” The middle-aged man from the séance who we had confronted in Liège for following me. “But why . . .”

  He flipped the book over so that I could see the back, pointing to the photograph of the author. The distinguished older gentleman in the image was decidedly not the man who had claimed to be him.

  “He lied,” I murmured rather needlessly.

  Sidney nodded. “Yes, and we didn’t catch it.”

  I scowled, feeling the same anger I heard in his voice over our being duped. “Well, dash it all. And he’s probably still following us.”

  “If he is, he’s doing a much better job at it. I haven’t seen him lurking about, and I’ve been paying attention.”

  “So have I,” I admitted. Had his bumbling nature been an act? To what end?

  I glanced down at the book again. “I suppose the photograph could be fake,” I suggested hopefully. The man captured there looked like the sort of person one wanted a gifted author to appear like. Maybe Mr. Fletcher didn’t want his real face plastered on the back of his books.

  Sidney didn’t say anything, merely arched his eyebrows letting me know he realized I didn’t believe that any more than he did.

  I frowned at the open page of the Bible as he replaced Mr. Fletcher’s book on the shelf.

  The corners of his mouth quirked upward in sympathy at my evident frustration with Emilie’s code. “Perhaps the sister can be persuaded to tell us where Madame Moreau is.”

  I could hear the sounds of her moving about in the next room. “If she even knows.”

  “It’s worth a shot.”

  But his steps were arrested before he’d even taken one. He loomed closer to stare down at the can. “Did you know you can see letters through the holes at the bottom?”

  I leapt to my feet to lean over the can. He was right. You could see individual letters through the punctures.

  My heart surged in excitement. “It’s a cipher.” I paused. “But what page?”

  I thought back over everything we’d learned, over all the memories I’d relived this week about my time spent with Emilie. And then my thoughts returned to what her sister had just told me.

  “You’ll know the game as surely as you know your name,” I repeated.

  Emilie had known me as Gabrielle during the war. Could she be referring to the angel Gabriel? But which verse?

  I began to flip the pages to the New Testament, but then the Book of Psalms caught my eye and I paused. There must be a half dozen or more verses that included Gabriel by name, but I could think of only one that mentioned verity. My mother had quoted it often enough to me, for that was how she’d chosen my name. It was verity the virtue and not Verity the name, but I didn’t think the distinction mattered.

  Turning back several pages, I located Psalm 111 and rested the can on the page just below the line with the word “verity” at the center. I had to rotate the can a bit, but sure enough the holes lined up to pick out the letters h, a, v, a, y.

  “What’s ‘havay’?” Sidney asked, reading over my shoulder.

  “Havay is a village a short distance from here.” But this answer only raised more questions. Namely about the village itself. For I was familiar with Havay, and I knew there was very little chance Emilie was staying there. Yet another breadcrumb on her trail?

  I looked up to find her sister watching me from the doorway. Her only parting words were, “Step with care.”

  CHAPTER 22

  “All right, out with it,” Sidney declared as we returned to the road. “What’s made you so windy about this village?”

  I gazed out over the golden fields now fallen silent when not so long ago they shook with the thunder of artillery guns. I knew I couldn�
��t keep this from him. He would see the truth for himself soon enough. And perhaps it was better if he was prepared.

  “In early 1918, the Germans evacuated Havay and then used it as a training ground for their heavy bombers. They wanted to test their latest large-caliber bombs in real situations before using them in operations.”

  Sidney glanced over at me. “You mean . . .” He couldn’t seem to finish the words.

  “They leveled it.”

  It would be little better than the war zone, minus the squalid trenches and rotting corpses.

  I watched as the reality of what we were about to drive into settled onto Sidney’s shoulders. His hands tensed around the driving wheel.

  Why Emilie was sending us to such a place, I didn’t know. Unless it had something to do with the wireless-controlled aeroplane she had been searching for evidence of. Had the Germans’ capability with such a weapon progressed to the point that they were testing it in the field? Monsieur Chauvin’s comments had led me to believe the matter was still in the earliest stages of development, but perhaps I’d misunderstood. After all, one significant cause of the collapse of the German Army had been the revolution that occurred in Germany, overthrowing the Kaiser and his imperial regime. Given another few months, would things have changed considerably?

  Whatever the truth, the proof of the Germans’ destructive capabilities soon came into view. We crested a small rise, and there unfolded before us a scene of utter destruction. I’d heard another agent describe Havay as a modern-day Pompeii, and the comparison was an apt one. Not a single building still stood. The town hall, the church, every house and farm had been reduced to rubble. And the land, which had undoubtedly been fields of rich soil, was pitted with craters and the splintered ruins of trees, much like I had witnessed along the front.

  Sidney slowed the motorcar and came to a stop in the middle of the road. Though he didn’t speak of it, I could sense the turmoil within him. The air was thick with it. I knew his memories of the war were not far from his thoughts. He’d twitched with them in his sleep as I drove us to Quevy.

  “Why did she tell us to step with care?” he asked. “Are there unexploded shells?”

  “It’s possible. It doesn’t look like anyone has done anything to begin clearing this debris to rebuild the town. If they even mean to.” I squeezed my hands together in my lap. “They trained some of their miners here as well, so there may also be undetonated mines.”

  Sidney turned to stare at me incredulously. “Does this Emilie mean to bump you off?”

  I smiled weakly. “I don’t know what her intentions are in bringing us here. There must be something she wants me to see.”

  He snorted in dissent but began to inch forward again.

  “But even so,” I added. “Let’s leave the motorcar at the edge of the destroyed area.”

  A profound sadness overcame me as I gingerly picked my way through the dust of what had undoubtedly been a flourishing village before the war. This place where people had lived and loved and dreamed had been turned into mere fodder for the enemy’s weapons. A quick glance at Sidney’s face showed that he was digesting the same thoughts, though he seemed more inclined to anger than dismay.

  We made our way through and around the heaps of rubble and skirted by the craters, walking several feet apart so as to distribute our weight across a greater area. Except in a few places where the going was rough, and he assisted me over the loose rocks and debris. The air was too quiet. Not even a birdcall to break the silence. Tufts of plants had begun to reclaim the soil in spots, growing wildly amidst the ruins with a few of the ever-present poppies that seemed to spring up in seemingly the most improbable places—just as those flowers had in the battlefields of Flanders. Even so, these blossoms were late bloomers; but our spring and early summer had been cool.

  It was a trail of these brilliant red poppies that led my gaze toward the wreckage of an aeroplane half-consumed by the ruin of a building. The aircraft must have been one of the last to fly over the area, for otherwise it would have been reduced to almost unrecognizable rubble like all the rest.

  I pointed to it, and Sidney and I made our way through the debris field closer to it. I’d only stood near an aeroplane once before, but as then, I was astonished by how flimsy and insubstantial the flying machine seemed. Particularly knowing it carried men up into the heavens, holding them aloft with nothing to catch them should it fail.

  I couldn’t help but think of the aviator from whom I’d stolen the map case. In the haze of his drunken bragging, he’d admitted that if not for alcohol, he would never have had the courage to leave the ground. And he was one of Germany’s crack pilots, with over twenty-five successful flights to his name. It was no wonder they’d kept the aeordromes stocked with kümmel.

  “I’m no expert. But doesn’t it look smaller than the aeroplanes we normally saw?” I offered hesitantly. “Even the Germans’ little Albatrosses?”

  Sidney nodded. “But who knows what aircraft they had in development by the end of the war?” He ventured closer, surmounting a pile of masonry as he leaned this way and that to examine the aeroplane.

  “Careful,” I gasped as his foot slipped, shifting the rubble beneath him. He paused, extending his arms to balance himself before continuing on.

  I moved a few steps to the right on the more level ground to see the aircraft from a better angle. The single wing had buckled over the cockpit and the front had all but been crushed by stones, but the tail, marked with the Germans’ black cross, was relatively unscathed.

  “Didn’t the lighter fighters, like the Albatross, usually escort the heavy bombers on their raids?” I asked, curious whether that was how this aeroplane had come to be here. But why would the swift, darting fighters be used on a practice run if the main goal was for the bombers to improve accuracy? I supposed they could have proved a distraction for new bomber pilots, so they’d sought to acclimate them to flying through the heart of those dizzying dogfights. Though something had definitely gone wrong here.

  When Sidney didn’t reply, I glanced toward where he arched up on tiptoe to peer into the cockpit. The look on his face was pinched and drawn, and I cringed at the possibility some evidence of the pilot’s battered body still remained.

  “What was inside here, I can’t say with any certainty,” he said, glancing up at me over the wreckage. “But I don’t think this was piloted by a human.”

  My eyes widened. “Why do you say that?”

  “There’s no space for a man. Unless he’s the size of a child. And all the controls have been ripped out.”

  “They wouldn’t have done that unless they wanted to salvage what was there because it was particularly exceptional, or . . .”

  “They wanted to keep it from falling into the wrong hands,” Sidney finished for me.

  Neither of us had to say the words, for we were both thinking the same thing. It appeared Emilie’s report of tales of a remote-controlled aircraft may have been based on fact after all, and not merely the usual German optimistic exaggeration.

  I studied the aeroplane with new eyes, not sure I wanted to believe such a thing was possible.

  “Of course,” Sidney spoke up again, interrupting my horrified musings. “The controls might not have been removed by the Germans.”

  He was right. There was no way to know who exactly had confiscated them. Just as there was no way to know precisely what had been there for them to take.

  But Emilie had wanted us to see this. I felt certain of it now. Why else send us here?

  Now, what were we supposed to do with this information?

  As if in answer to my silent question, something fluttered in the corner of my eye. I turned to see a piece of faded, yellow fabric billowing in the breeze. I was drawn toward it and noted that one end of the cloth appeared to be trapped beneath a rock next to the squat remnants of a wall. Somehow, I doubted it had survived this way for nearly a year since the village’s destruction.

  I was rewarded for
my curiosity, for at the base of the wall I could see words written in English painted in stark white against the gray stone.

  If you dare not grasp this, you should not seek me.

  Another code.

  I sighed and reached out to touch the stone with my gloved fingers, ruminating on her riddle. Something about the phrasing niggled at the back of my brain, but I couldn’t recall why.

  Behind me the crunch of Sidney’s footsteps came to a stop. “Another message from Emilie?”

  I rose to my feet. “Yes. Though I’m not quite certain how to decipher it.”

  Sidney leaned down to read the words before standing again. “Sounds like something from a poem.”

  “Yes, I had a similar thought.” I chewed on my lip.

  “Maybe Byron? Or Tennyson? Or Shakespeare?”

  I glanced at him in amusement. “Or Chaucer or Wordsworth?” Poetry had evidently not been my husband’s favorite subject if he was merely going to rattle off some of the most famous names.

  He shrugged, accepting my teasing without complaint.

  I felt a drop of water on my forehead and then another, and glanced up toward the sky. The rain that had been threatening all morning began to fall somewhat sporadically, almost as if it couldn’t make up its mind.

  But just in case it decided to begin in earnest, we began to make our way back toward the motorcar. It was as we passed a pair of red poppies sprouting on a grassy verge that the answer came to me.

  “It’s Brontë,” I gasped.

  “Emily?”

  “No, Anne. ‘But he that dares not grasp the thorn should never crave the rose.’”

  “I see. She’s the rose, since that’s her real given name.” Sidney opened the motorcar door for me. “But how does that tell us where to go?”

  I frowned, arrested in thought. “ ‘If you dare not grasp this,’” I murmured, turning my head to gaze out past Sidney’s arm toward the trees growing in the distance, spared from Havay’s destruction. “ ‘This.’ The thorn.”

  “I assume you can ponder the matter just as well inside the motorcar.”