The doctor came to set Marianne’s father’s broken leg. He had a dusty Renault that managed to take the rutted road quite nicely. He was tall, and well dressed, and he asked only medical questions. Marianne’s father allowed himself to be examined, although he suggested that the doctor be quick about it. The leg was promptly and simply set against a splint. Marianne’s father cursed while the procedure was taking place, then thanked the doctor for his efforts.
The doctor left some pain pills, which the farmer would not take as a matter of principle, and he recommended that the old man stay off his feet for three weeks, then use crutches, continuing to keep the weight off his leg for another three.
As Marianne walked the doctor out, they blinked in the bright sunlight.
“They could come back,” the doctor said.
“We’ll have faith that they won’t,” Marianne responded.
They agreed on that and shook hands.
Marianne saw to her chores when the doctor had gone, cleaning out the barn, milking the goat, gathering the geese, and finally chasing after the chickens that had scattered into the woods. She supposed they had saved her, for surely if she had not gone to chase after them she would have been the one the soldiers had turned on, and perhaps her enraged father would have been shot point-blank. She made a vow not to eat chicken again, only their eggs, and not to be as impatient with them as she usually was.
As for the slaughtered cow, she butchered it and burned the bones on a bonfire. Someone had once told her that when you return to a location from your past, it is never the same, and perhaps this was true. She had left an ordinary place, and had come back to something quite different, somewhere where anything could happen.
When Monsieur Félix was well enough to come downstairs on his crutches, they went out to the barn, where Marianne helped him put on the white cheesecloth veil so he could see to the honey. In the distance there were spikes of purple and pink lupines, a riot of color. The honeycombs were rich and golden, and later that week Marianne would bring the honey to the market to sell. People took note of Marianne now that she was back, but she rarely ventured into town, and no one was rude enough to mention her long absence, although the pastor came to speak to her as she was leaving for home. She remembered going to see him when she was an unhappy, sulky girl. He hadn’t understood what she’d wanted, but of course she hadn’t known herself. A different life, a chance at love, a larger world, buried desires that seemed silly now that she was back. Pastor Durand had aged and was wearing a black coat. He walked Marianne home down the same road she had taken when she left. At first they politely spoke about the weather. But clearly there was more to discuss. The pastor glanced at her.
“You may have noticed,” he said, “everything has changed.”
Of course it had. Everything did, even she herself. Still, she wanted to hear what he had to say that was so important he was huffing and puffing as they walked on at a quick pace, for Marianne was not one to dawdle, especially when she had what her father called the “bee money” in her pocket.
“We have many children at the school at the top of the hill,” Pastor Durand told her. “They’re not from here. They’re refugees.” The road from the village careened steeply, ending in fields of greenery where there were half a dozen buildings, including classrooms and dormitories. From the corner of his eye he gauged Marianne’s reaction. The boarding school sheltered Jewish children, and the ministers André Trocme and Edouard Theis had arranged for thousands of Jewish children to be hidden with families in town and in the countryside, and Daniel Trocme, the principal of the school, accepted as many Jewish children as possible.
“I should give you some honey for the schoolchildren,” Marianne said. “They’d enjoy it.”
It took two hours to hike from the village to the farm, but the pastor didn’t seem to mind even though it meant he would be journeying back in the dark. Marianne had a newfound respect for him. He came into the house and shook hands with Monsieur Félix, then he slipped off his black coat, under which he had been carrying a rifle. He placed it on the table and winked at Marianne’s father. Monsieur Félix brightened then. The Germans had taken his rifle and he liked the look of this one.
The pastor knew the old man’s gun had been stolen. As it turned out, Monsieur Cazales had told the pastor about the blood on Marianne’s dress. From the hilltop that abutted their properties the neighbor could see for himself that the cows were gone. When he added these facts together, there was only one reason why this should be.
Marianne’s father now had a long scar down one side of his scalp, and he limped. When asked about it, the old man avoided complaining.
“Something may have happened.” Monsieur Félix shrugged.
“We refuse to bow to anyone,” the pastor said. “We never have and never will.”
Marianne’s father nodded in agreement. Fifty years earlier there had been a movement called le Réveil, the Awakening, a period in which Huguenots were asked to remember their mistreatment by the Catholic majority to remind them they must never let persecution happen again. They were pacifists who believed in the greater good, a philosophy they began to act upon in 1939, when they accepted Spanish war refugees into their community, taking them into their houses and barns. Later it was the sick children of workers, for the mountain air was thought to cure their ailments. Now it was the Jews. Monsieur Félix had never met a Jew, but that didn’t matter to him.
“We will hide anyone in need as we were forced to hide,” he told the pastor.
The men shook hands on it. The entire village had agreed to stand up to the Germans and would, by the time they were through, rescue between three thousand and five thousand Jews. There would be a messenger coming by, the pastor said, with identity papers that must be hidden so that children could cross the border into Switzerland. Other members of the Resistance would later come to claim the papers. Would this be a problem? Monsieur Félix laughed. He so rarely did so that both the pastor and Marianne were surprised. Then they found themselves laughing with him. No, it was not a problem; it was a blessing to rebel against tyranny, as their grandfathers had done.
Marianne served tea with their own honey. Everyone said it was the best on earth, and the pastor agreed. He asked if Marianne still knew the mountains as well as she had when she was a girl, and she said that indeed she did, even after her time away. She still had the talent of finding her way in the dark.
Would she be willing to take children across the border? She would be a passeur, a local resident who knew the topography, as well as the times of the patrols, and could manage to get those who were fleeing through the barbed-wire barriers. She would be assisted by the OSE, who provided for as many escapes as could be arranged into neutral Switzerland. The Œuvre de Secours aux Enfants was a Jewish organization begun in Russia and Berlin, whose goal was to rescue the next generation. The organization placed refugee children in châteaus the government allowed to be designated as schools.
Marianne thought over this request as she went to collect some speckled eggs from the hens to send home with the pastor. Her heart jolted against her chest and she noticed how sweet the air was. When she returned she said that yes, she would indeed be a guide.
“I can’t promise her safety,” Pastor Durand said to Monsieur Félix.
Marianne looked at her father, who nodded, but she made certain to answer for herself. “No one has to promise me anything.”
Marianne’s father was a man who was always willing to try to do what was right. If he was not a warrior or an angel, if he rarely spoke and never asked her what she thought or what she felt when she was young, he had always tried to do God’s will and act with faith. Now it seemed his daughter was the same, and he was filled with a raw pride. Guiding people across the border was dangerous. Several people had been detained at a crossing place known as the plaine du loup, the Wolf’s Plain. If Marianne were apprehended, she would be on her own. Monsieur Félix gazed at her and thought about Jeanne
d’Arc, the girl warrior. Perhaps his daughter was stronger than he’d thought.
“Are you sure you want to help the pastor?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” Marianne said. She had always wished to accomplish something, and, as it turned out, this is what she had been waiting for all along.
She went the first time with a man from the village, Albert, with whom she had gone to school and who now had a wife and five children. They shook hands and he told her to take the lead, even though he was a practiced passeur, to see if she still knew her way through the mountains. It took them close to a week, and then they got a ride back from another passeur from Annecy. Marianne felt exhausted and enthralled. She had remembered everything, and was as good a hiker as anyone. She walked from town thinking of the faces of the children who had been rescued. When she got to the house she was surprised to hear voices inside. She went to the barn for a hatchet, fearing another incident with the Germans, but when she returned her father opened the door to tell her they had a visitor, a young man who was a friend of hers.
“I don’t have any friends.” Marianne kept the hatchet in her hand as she walked inside, but dropped it the moment she saw Victor at the table, where he’d been having lunch with Monsieur Félix. Victor looked completely different, thinner and tougher, with his dark hair shaggy and long enough to bother him so that he kept flinging one hand through it, pushing it back. There were fresh burns on his hands and face that showed clearly he had been in an accident.
“Isn’t he your friend?” her father said, confused.
“Yes of course,” Marianne said, her heart lifting. Victor rose so quickly from his chair that it tipped back and fell with a clatter. He came to embrace her, and in his arms she rose off the floor. She was surprised when he stole a kiss, and even more surprised that the kiss burned. That was how it had begun.
He explained he had been living in the forest with a small group of Jewish resisters, and there had been an accident, a bomb had gone wrong. They’d scattered for a while. Victor had been hurt, his face and hands had been scorched. “You need to heal or you’ll be no use to anyone,” his friend Claude had told him.
Victor had seen a doctor known for helping their people. After that, the one place he could think to go was Beehive House.
“I remembered everything you ever told me about your home,” he told Marianne. “That’s how I found you.”
Marianne insisted he put her down. She sat to join them for lunch. She was starving, but it didn’t matter. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. Even before the dishes were done, she melted beeswax in a pan, then added olive oil and lavender as an herbal salve. Victor grinned at her as she saw to his burns. When he leaned forward to whisper he was much too close. “It was always you,” he told her.
“Quiet,” she said, glancing at her father. “That’s nonsense.”
But it wasn’t nonsense, at least not for her. She let him kiss her again, but only once, when her father was outside with Bluebell, the goat. “That’s enough,” she said, but of course it wasn’t. She made up a bed for him in the parlor, and he went to sleep immediately, grateful and exhausted. Victor was beautiful and young. But he wasn’t a boy anymore; he was a fighter. Marianne’s head was spinning to think he was here, in their house. When her father asked if she’d like to look at the stars, she was happy to do so.
“That boy seems to know you well,” her father said in an offhand way as he lit a small cigar, one of a few that he rationed for special occasions.
“Well, of course. We shared a house for five years.”
“Were you happy when you were away?” For all those years he had wondered what his daughter’s life was like in Paris. He thought she might come home with a family, a husband and perhaps some sons, but that was not the case.
“I was happy,” Marianne said. “He made me happy,” she admitted. “But I missed this place.”
The stars were falling from the sky as they climbed up the hill, he on his crutches, she with a ready arm to guide him. She made her father a promise that nothing would happen under his roof.
“Whatever happens, you’re my daughter,” he said.
She nodded, content to be here with him to gaze at the constellations that were so familiar from her childhood. You couldn’t see a trail of stars covering the entire sky in Paris. You had to be here in the countryside on a clear night. She thought of Victor asleep in the parlor, and the powder burns on his face and hands. He was here for now, and that was enough. Everything might disappear, but not these stars. Her father should not have the strength to climb this hillock, but he did it anyway, and he trusted her to do what was best. He was who he was, after all, and had loved her even while she was gone. Standing beside him, she felt fortunate to have found her way home.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BLESSING
RHôNE VALLEY, JUNE 1942
THE SISTERS HAD BEEN THE residents of a tall stone convent where there was a boarding school for girls for nearly three hundred years. The spires reached to heaven. The gravel paths were worn down from those who walked there daily as they recited their prayers. In the woods near the convent, Ava could hear the rise and fall of voices from inside. The nuns at prayer, the students at the dinner table, and then, the faintest voices of all, five Jewish girls in the attic who were well cared for, but who still wept at night, longing for their mothers. More and more children had been separated from their parents when the Vichy government decided to arrest Jews, except for children under the age of sixteen. Many of these children, who were now on their own, were living in châteaus and schools run by the OSE, who turned to convents such as this, and to the homes of those good neighbors who believed a child’s life was worth more than adhering to arbitrary laws.
The sisters had originally been lacemakers, but during the Reign of Terror many were beheaded by guillotine or thrown into prison. For the next twenty years they were in hiding, until they could at last be free to live and work as their faith decreed. During the Revolution, when they would not sign documents stating their first allegiance was to France, rather than to God, the congregation was outlawed until 1807. The sisters understood what it was to be persecuted and arrested and murdered, for a crime no worse than faith.
The convent and its grounds were elegant and lush, thanks to several wealthy women who, over the convent’s long history, had joined the order and brought their wealth with them. In their legendary garden grew roses of every color: rouge; noire; blanche; feu, the color of fire; cerise, the shade of cherries; argent, silver; and or, gold. Some varieties had first names and surnames, as though they were elegant women shrouded in vivid color standing between the hedges in silk dresses: Madame Isaac Pereire, created in 1881, Madame Ernest Calvat, first grown in 1888, Bourbon Roses and tea roses of every hue and tone, all grown by the grace of God.
The mother superior, Sister Marie, had grown up in a château outside Paris and recalled the bliss of the garden of her childhood. She’d been delighted to come to the convent as a young woman to find the leggy, half-remembered, and utterly neglected planting of roses. From the start, she vowed to bring the garden back to its former glory. Her first act as mother superior was to hire a landscaper who would teach the sisters to garden.
Sister Marie had been orphaned young and left with a huge inheritance. Her aunt, a grudging and disagreeable caretaker, had initially disapproved when the child yearned for convent life, but when someone is convinced she has a path, it is not easy to dissuade her, and in the end it was a relief for the family to have her safe and sound, outside of their orbit. Sister Marie had been very single-minded even when she’d been Madeleine de Masson, a shy girl who, nevertheless, possessed a fierce independent streak. It was no surprise that she had dedicated her life to teaching. Nor was it a surprise that she didn’t need to think twice when the Archbishop of Nice, Monsignor Paul Rémond, asked her to enroll Jewish girls who had been brought to them by the OSE.
The new girl was discovered camped on the front ste
ps. Lea had barely spoken a word to the sisters; perhaps the convent looked like a prison with its tall spires and weathered gargoyles that seemed neither beast nor man. There was a stone fountain, and green water poured from the beak of a pelican, the bird that signified Jesus, for as pelicans were said to pluck their feathers to feed their young with their own blood, so, too, did Christ sacrifice himself for mankind. Lea felt a chill when the tall woman in a black habit came along the gravel path. Fewer questions would be asked if Lea came to the convent alone, and so Ava would wait a day or two before presenting herself and asking to work in the kitchen. As soon as Ava suggested this plan, Lea suspected she would not return. What would keep her from disappearing, following the heron to the far reaches of the world? And who was to say it would not be best for them both if she did? They would be free of each other, and of the burdens they carried, and of the fate that awaited them.
Sister Marie came to greet the new girl, who was clearly troubled, as so many of these motherless children were. Perhaps this girl, who kept her hands folded in her lap, and her eyes lowered, would like to help in the garden. It soothed the soul to do so and it might serve to remind her of the beauty of the world.
She asked the girl for her name.
“Lillie Perrin, Madame.”
The girl’s eyes were lowered, which led the mother superior to believe this was not the truth.
“Lillie is your given name?”
Lea had been given it, surely, by her own dear mother before leaving Berlin, so perhaps when she said yes it was not truly a lie. Lea had heard that Catholics confessed their sins to one another rather than to God, and she worried she would be expected to do the same. Her greatest sin would be committed in the future, and it was one for which she could never be forgiven.
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