He turned back around just in time to see the planes approaching.
Shit.
They came in the standard Kette or chain formation that all Germans pilots favored, with one leader and a wingman followed by other pairs in a linked echelon. There were eight of them.
Alec rolled his tongue against his lower lip. Ellenor grabbed his shoulder, and he nodded. Yes, of course I see them, old girl.
Their noses were painted blue, their wing decks a desert tan. They were a mix of Albatros fighters, most of them the sprightly D.III models. With two guns each, they were capable of bringing sixteen barrels right at him. They were two hundred yards away and closing.
Alec tightened his hands on the control wheel.
Hold steady, for Christ’s sake.
But that was far easier said than done. He’d faced large numbers of the enemy before, but he was usually accompanied by several of his own birds, evening the odds. On his best day, he’d taken out two of the enemy and winged a third, but he’d been in The Dragon that afternoon and full of grit and guile. Today he was none of those things.
Their howling propellers looked like black circles as they neared.
Were they going to fire on him? Alec snapped from his trance and checked his gun. In addition to the swivel-mounted weapon at the observer’s seat, Hildegard sported a fixed-position 7.92-millimeter light machine gun, synchronized with the propeller so that it could spit out its bullets without shooting off the spinning blades. Alec prepared to fire by engaging the cocking lever. He flexed his fingers. If the Huns decided to attack, he wouldn’t be able to take them all out, but if he cleared two in the center of the formation, he might be able to get Hildegard down near the ground so they could at least land safely before they were blown to splinters.
The lead Albatros was almost directly in front of him, just off to his left side. The others held a practiced formation behind their leader. Alec took a breath and waited for their response.
The German planes passed within thirty yards of him and kept going. One of the pilots waved.
Alec, dumbfounded, lifted a hand.
Then they were gone.
Too stunned even to turn and watch them go, Alec released his death grip on the trigger.
Behind him, Ellenor said something that sounded like a relieved curse. All Alec could manage was a weak thumbs-up.
The sky offered no further threats. Down below, the land looked like the cover of a charming children’s book, with everything divided up into fastidious little squares. Nothing indicated how close they’d almost come to the enemy’s teeth.
Alec smiled broadly, stupidly, swallowing the warm air.
By and by he returned to the matter at hand. The luck of a gambler could run dry at any particular moment, so he focused on his gauges, noting the petrol supply and doing a quick bit of math. All was well—for now.
Twenty minutes later, they came upon the river.
Alec aligned Hildegard with the course of the Moselle. The silver-blue water looked idyllic from here, winding through farms and little villages and carefully sculpted fields where they grew Riesling and other grapes. The region had belonged to France until about fifty years ago, and now the Germans understood the joys of a good pinot noir. No wonder the French wanted it back.
They flew for miles like that. Alec had forgotten what it was like, being airborne and not worrying about getting jumped by Fritz. Flying was pure. You owed no one anything up here, not even gravity, and no one owed you. For millennia men had dreamed of doing the very thing that Alec and Ellenor were doing right now. Inventors had constructed pipe frames and flaps; naturalists had drawn countless bird wings; fools had jumped.
“And here we are.”
He wished he could turn around in his seat and share the moment with her, as he suspected she was experiencing similar feelings. But then chimney smoke appeared on the horizon.
The first thing he saw of Metz was its balloon.
German observation balloons, known as Drachen to the natives, were hundred-foot horizontal brown bags of hydrogen that allowed an observer in a dangling basket to see great distances. The British, with their usual impudence, called them sausages.
Ellenor leaned forward and yelled: “What is that?”
“A lookout!”
The massive balloon floated over a thousand feet up and was tethered to the ground by a mooring cable. Usually such things were positioned just behind the Front as a way of targeting artillery bombardments; the man in the basket used a wireless radio device, signal flares, or even colored streamers to inform the gun crews how to pinpoint their attack. A man at one thousand feet with the proper optics could, on a clear day, see forty miles in every direction. Other balloons were kitted out with photographic cameras so that pictures could be produced of enemy emplacements.
This one was a watchdog. No doubt the observer in his wicker roost had used his field glasses and watched Hildegard approach. His task was to alert anti-aircraft personnel about incoming threats. If the bombing raid were to be successful here, the French scout planes would need to drop down unnoticed from the clouds and use incendiary rounds to light the sausage on fire before the big steel-framed Breguet bombers arrived to raze the factory. And by then, Sarah needed to be far away.
Alec gave the balloon a wide berth and continued on to Metz.
The city soon sprawled beneath him, but he didn’t waste time ogling it. More than sixty thousand people lived here, and the longer he and Ellenor remained aloft, the more eyes that would find them, and that meant more curiosity, more questions. He lowered the plane’s nose and reduced speed as he swept out and around the edge of the urban center. He looked for a suitable place to put down and located one about two miles from the city, tucked behind a hill. The field was blocked on three sides by trees, which was good, and there was no farmhouse nearby, which was also good. Alec didn’t have quite as much surface area as he would have liked, but he’d landed planes on plots of land the size of an envelope before, so he brazenly cut the engine and let Hildegard glide silently to earth.
****
Ellenor, feet again on terra firma, suddenly recalled the Yiddish word that Josef had taught her: bashert. She had never believed in a preordained life. You crossed the bridges you built yourself, not ones that some team of celestial carpenters had constructed on your behalf.
She and Alec spent nearly an hour concealing the plane with deadfall, weeds, and slender limbs broken from walnut trees. It was not a perfect disguise, but Alec surmised that it would be sufficient to fool the casual observer.
“Shall we, then?” he asked, stowing his insulated coat in the plane.
Ellenor pushed up her sweater sleeves. “To the factory?”
“Straight to Sarah’s house, actually. She lives on a street called Foch—at least she did the last time we exchanged correspondence. I always addressed the post to Sarah Weller of Foch Street. Still sounds peculiar, her having a different last name.” He pointed. “At any rate, we should get moving.”
Ellenor felt like there was more to say. The flight had been exhilarating. She wanted to talk about it, to ask him if it was always that way, to bring back the grin that had only now faded from her face. Flying was just as children believed it to be when they lay on their backs in the grass and imagined swinging on vines between the clouds.
Alec set off for the city, and she matched his strides.
After a few minutes, she said, “How long did it take you to learn?”
“To learn what?”
“How to operate an airplane.”
“A few weeks, I suppose.”
“That’s all?”
“Well, the RFC is always in something of a rush to get boys into the air, but yes, it’s just a matter of listening to lectures and then sitting in a wingless tub to practice the stick and rudder bar. When it’s finally time to get into the air, every man starts as an observer, just to see if you’re going to vomit the first time you leave the ground. I didn’t, by th
e by.”
“What about women?”
“What about them?”
“Are there any female pilots?”
“Good Lord, I should think not.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How many women do you know who drive automobiles? I can count them on one hand.”
“If it weren’t for my driving an automobile, you’d still be lying on a hillside.”
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t drive. It’s just uncommon that you do.”
“I’ve been doing a lot of uncommon things lately.”
“That makes two of us. I’m absent without leave. As far as anyone knows at the aerodrome, I embarked on an unauthorized solo patrol flight and never returned.”
“And if you make it back there? If you get your sister safely to the other side, how will you account for yourself?”
“I’ll face a court-martial, presumably.”
“They’ll arrest you?”
“Undoubtedly.” He smiled at her, ever game for a challenge. “My new plan is to blame everything entirely on you.”
“I believe, sir, the evidence does not support your claim.”
“Never let the lack of hard evidence prevent you from shifting all blame to someone else. Shakespeare said that, you know.”
“He did, huh?”
“Well, I paraphrased him, of course. He had a few more thous and shalts in there.”
She rolled her eyes but favored him with a smile of her own. “I’m sure he did.”
They walked in silence, watching the city grow larger. A place of industry and commerce, Metz pushed smoke into the sky from hundreds of flues. Ellenor became very aware of how she was dressed. No one in the city would approve. Even a woman performing wartime work was rarely seen in trousers, unless she was tromping behind a plow. Uniforms were perfectly acceptable, but the top was always paired with a calf-length dress. If not engaged in some type of labor in support of the war effort, ladies across Europe wore the Kriegskrinoline, a suit-and-skirt combination that might have been more practical than previous fashions, without all those cumbersome hoops, but it was certainly no good for keeping out angry bees during a hive inspection. Ellenor hoped her unusual attire wouldn’t rouse too much suspicion.
“Are you worried about how it will be when you see your sister again?” she asked.
“What do you mean by ‘how it will be’?”
“You know, are you nervous? You’ve not seen her in a long time.”
“That’s true, and I am. The war shut everything down. It’s like the world went dark. The letters simply stopped coming. I want to make sure she’s all right.”
Ellenor heard the raw concern in his voice. She was an only child and couldn’t feel whatever it was he was feeling, but she shared his sense of loss. Ellenor was now homeless. If she spent too much time thinking about that, she’d have a breakdown right here on the side of the well-rutted road, bashert be damned.
They reached the outskirts of Metz by midmorning. Keeping away from the main road into the city, they walked among the simple homes of vineyard workers, farmers, and shepherds. They saw only the young and the old; everyone in the middle was either off fighting somewhere or providing a support function in a factory or on the back of a truck. Military service for fit young men was compulsory, so jobs were reassigned. Ellenor and Alec passed a woman delivering milk, a boy of no more than thirteen changing a truck tire, and a pair of white-haired men repairing a levee. Alec was the exception, so he kept his head down and his back hunched, his hands buried in his pockets.
“Where is this Foch Street?” Ellenor asked without looking at him.
“No idea. Luckily I have a fluent partner.”
“Partner? What was your original plan? How did you intend to find your sister before almost crashing into my bees?”
“I have a little German. Not much. But I can manage to ask for directions. And to find the local pub.”
She shook her head. “You’re nearly impossible.”
“I appreciate the ‘nearly.’ There’s someone there. She looks harmless enough.”
By now they’d entered the city proper, the street made of bricks, the rooftops of gray slate. A woman in a gingham dress swept the dirt from the porch of what appeared to be a cobbler’s shop, with shoes of practical designs on display in one narrow window. No one bought anything. These days, folks wore their shoes until the soles crumbled, spending their small earnings on food, medicine, and tobacco. Everything else could wait.
Ellenor approached the woman, said hello, and asked about the Wellers of Foch Street.
“Not familiar with any Wellers,” the woman said. She leaned heavily on her broom, her face red and hard. She was the right age to have sons at war. If they’d been sent west, they were likely pinned down in Belgium somewhere. If they’d gone east, they were fighting the Russians, who’d been in general disarray since the revolution in February but were still quite adept at killing hotheaded Germans. The cobbler-woman’s eyes said as much.
“Can you tell me how to find the street?” Ellenor asked.
The woman provided simple directions and returned immediately to her work, as if sensing the danger of speaking too long to a stranger.
Ellenor rejoined Alec. “This way.”
“What did she say?”
“Very little.”
“She knew of the street?”
“Yes, but not of any Mr. and Mrs. Weller. If we find them, it’s bashert, and if not, that’s bashert, too.”
“I’m not familiar with that word.”
“It’s like…destiny.”
“Ah. A good destiny, I hope.”
“Not necessarily. That’s the point.”
The city proper rose up around them, the avenues becoming cramped, twisting things with no logic behind their layout. On either side of these streets stood buildings of yellow limestone that ran abruptly into the modern and very Germanic architecture of the town’s more recent rulers. A fishmonger in the brightest apron Ellenor had ever seen hailed them from a corner stall, motioning to the catch his young sons had pulled from the Moselle just the night before. Ellenor waved a no, thank you and crossed the street in the wake of a rattletrap truck spewing blue fumes.
“Again,” she said, “I wonder how you’d planned on finding anyone in this city on your own in the dark.”
“I’ve always gotten lucky. I’d planned on starting at a tavern.”
“And trade drinking songs for directions?”
“You don’t approve of drinking with the enemy?”
“They’re not the enemy.”
“Well…somebody is.”
A pair of mules was hitched to a wagon in front of an ice house. Boys loaded canvas-wrapped blocks into the wagon and packed them with straw. A woman sold faded flowers from a cart, while gossips in head scarves stood on the corner and caught up on the daily roster of rumors. The people conducted their business with occasional glances at the sky; German airships had been bombing London, so surely repercussions were to follow. Their talk was a mixture not only of languages but of dialects within those languages. Old women who’d been born French seventy years ago had become Germans when their city changed hands, and now they were something uniquely in between: Messines, a people who had learned to bargain, to complain mostly in secret, and to survive.
“What is your brother-in-law’s name?” Ellenor asked, eyeing an elderly couple holding hands beneath an unlit gaslight. They held bags of potatoes.
“I’m sorry?”
“Sarah’s husband. What’s his name?”
“Uh, Stefan. Stefan Weller. But we’re not looking for him. He’s dead, remember? Sarah is a widow. They were married for only two years before he passed.”
“I thought the property might still be under his name, or that someone might remember him. Stay here.” Ellenor crossed the street and steeled herself to again pretend to be someone she was not. She fastened a smile to her face, said good morning, and in
quired about the Wellers, and when they told her that an Herr Weller resided near the old granary just up the street, she thanked them and wondered randomly what Father had told Karl and Truda about her sudden disappearance. Did they now believe she’d deceived them? Had all the fondness they felt for her been replaced by something else?
“Well?” Alec asked when she returned to him.
“A man named Weller lives not far from here.”
“A man? So…a relative of Stefan’s, perhaps?”
“We’ll see. This way.”
She wanted to wash her clothes. And after they were clean, she wanted to write a letter to Father and try to explain. He probably thought her a monster. And she still wanted to know why half of her bees had died.
They followed a wide, cobbled street, sand-colored buildings wedged closely together on either side, their balconies festooned with mementoes for those at the Front. Half-feral dogs were everywhere. On the corner stood a statue of some colonial hero from the Wahehe War in Africa. A warehouse-like building that looked as old as the Roman Empire served as a granary. Directly across the street from it was a two-story home with shutters closed on all the windows but one. Above the house’s wooden doorframe was a pair of interlocked cherubs, their coating of gold leaf mostly gone. One of the angels was missing an arm. A metal plaque bore the family name in Gothic lettering: WELLER.
“This may not be the right place,” she reminded him.
“I suppose we’ll know soon enough.”
They approached the door, guarded by its faded angels. Alec let out a long breath. Ellenor had the sudden impulse to give his hand an encouraging squeeze, but she thought better of it. Then she said to hell with that and did it anyway.
He gave her a strained smile in return, then drummed the butt of his fist on the door.
Chapter Seventeen
Gustov lost a pilot that morning.
Eleven Fokker triplanes had taken to the sky shortly after dawn, charged with delivering support to an armored column that was falling back to a more strategic position about ten kilometers from No Man’s Land. The troops had taken a pounding from a pair of French 75-millimeter field guns and needed to regroup and tend to the wounded. Gustov’s squadron covered the soldiers from the air, but they ran afoul of a swarm of Spads an hour into their mission.
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