Ordinarily Vianne would make a comment about what a gossip Hélène was, but she couldn’t be glib. According to Papa, Isabelle had left Paris days ago. She still hadn’t arrived at Le Jardin. “I’m worried about Isabelle,” she said.
Rachel linked her arm through Vianne’s. “Do you remember the first time your sister ran away from that boarding school in Lyon?”
“She was seven years old.”
“She made it all the way to Amboise. Alone. With no money. She spent two nights in the woods and talked her way onto the train.”
Vianne barely remembered anything of that time except for her own grief. When she’d lost the first baby, she’d fallen into despair. The lost year, Antoine called it. That was how she thought of it, too. When Antoine told her he was taking Isabelle to Paris, and to Papa, Vianne had been—God help her—relieved.
Was it any surprise that Isabelle had run away from the boarding school to which she’d been sent? To this day, Vianne felt an abiding shame at how she had treated her baby sister.
“She was nine the first time she made it to Paris,” Vianne said, trying to find comfort in the familiar story. Isabelle was tough and driven and determined; she always had been.
“If I’m not mistaken, she was expelled two years later for running away from school to see a traveling circus. Or was that when she climbed out of the second-floor dormitory window using a bedsheet?” Rachel smiled. “The point is, Isabelle will make it here if that’s what she wants.”
“God help anyone who tries to stop her.”
“She will arrive any day. I promise. Unless she has met an exiled prince and fallen desperately in love.”
“That is the kind of thing that could happen to her.”
“You see?” Rachel teased. “You feel better already. Now come to my house for lemonade. It’s just the thing on a day this hot.”
*
After supper, Vianne got Sophie settled into bed and went downstairs. She was too worried to relax. The silence in her house kept reminding her that no one had come to her door. She could not remain still. Regardless of her conversation with Rachel, she couldn’t dispel her worry—and a terrible sense of foreboding—about Isabelle.
Vianne stood up, sat down, then stood again and walked to the front door, opening it.
Outside, the fields lay beneath a purple and pink evening sky. Her yard was a series of familiar shapes—well-tended apple trees stood protectively between the front door and the rose-and-vine-covered stone wall, beyond which lay the road to town and acres and acres of fields, studded here and there with thickets of narrow-trunked trees. Off to the right was the deeper woods where she and Antoine had often sneaked off to be alone when they were younger.
Antoine.
Isabelle.
Where were they? Was he at the front? Was she walking from Paris?
Don’t think about it.
She needed to do something. Gardening. Keep her mind on something else.
After retrieving her worn gardening gloves and stepping into the boots by the door, she made her way to the garden positioned on a flat patch of land between the shed and the barn. Potatoes, onions, carrots, broccoli, peas, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and radishes grew in its carefully tended beds. On the hillside between the garden and the barn were the berries—raspberries and blackberries in carefully contained rows. She knelt down in the rich, black dirt and began pulling weeds.
Early summer was usually a time of promise. Certainly, things could go wrong in this most ardent season, but if one remained steady and calm and didn’t shirk the all-important duties of weeding and thinning, the plants could be guided and tamed. Vianne always made sure that the beds were precisely organized and tended with a firm yet gentle hand. Even more important than what she gave her garden was what it gave her. In it, she found a sense of calm.
She became aware of something wrong slowly, in pieces. First, there was a sound that didn’t belong, a vibration, a thudding, and then a murmur. The odors came next: something wholly at odds with her sweet garden smell, something acrid and sharp that made her think of decay.
Vianne wiped her forehead, aware that she was smearing black dirt across her skin, and stood up. Tucking her dirty gloves in the gaping hip pockets of her pants, she rose to her feet and moved toward her gate. Before she reached it, a trio of women appeared, as if sculpted out of the shadows. They stood clumped together in the road just behind her gate. An old woman, dressed in rags, held the others close to her—a young woman with a babe-in-arms and a teenaged girl who held an empty birdcage in one hand and a shovel in the other. Each looked glassy-eyed and feverish; the young mother was clearly trembling. Their faces were dripping with sweat, their eyes were filled with defeat. The old woman held out dirty, empty hands. “Can you spare some water?” she asked, but even as she asked her the question, she looked unconvinced. Beaten.
Vianne opened the gate. “Of course. Would you like to come in? Sit down, perhaps?”
The old woman shook her head. “We are ahead of them. There’s nothing for those in the back.”
Vianne didn’t know what the woman meant, but it didn’t matter. She could see that the women were suffering from exhaustion and hunger. “Just a moment.” She went into the house and packed them some bread and raw carrots and a small bit of cheese. All that she had to spare. She filled a wine bottle with water and returned, offering them the provisions. “It’s not much,” she said.
“It is more than we’ve had since Tours,” the young woman said in a toneless voice.
“You were in Tours?” Vianne asked.
“Drink, Sabine,” the old woman said, holding the water to the girl’s lips.
Vianne was about to ask about Isabelle when the old woman said sharply, “They’re here.”
The young mother made a moaning sound and tightened her hold on the baby, who was so quiet—and his tiny fist so blue—that Vianne gasped.
The baby was dead.
Vianne knew about the kind of talon grief that wouldn’t let go; she had fallen into the fathomless gray that warped a mind and made a mother keep holding on long after hope was gone.
“Go inside,” the old woman said to Vianne. “Lock your doors.”
“But…”
The ragged trio backed away—lurched, really—as if Vianne’s breath had become noxious.
And then she saw the mass of black shapes moving across the field and coming up the road.
The smell preceded them. Human sweat and filth and body odor. As they neared, the miasma of black separated, peeled into forms. She saw people on the road and in the fields; walking, limping, coming toward her. Some were pushing bicycles or prams or dragging wagons. Dogs barked, babies cried. There was coughing, throat clearing, whining. They came forward, through the field and up the road, relentlessly moving closer, pushing one another aside, their voices rising.
Vianne couldn’t help so many. She rushed into her house and locked the door behind her. Inside, she went from room to room, locking doors and closing shutters. When she was finished, she stood in the living room, uncertain, her heart pounding.
The house began to shake, just a little. The windows rattled, the shutters thumped against the stone exterior. Dust rained down from the exposed timbers of the ceiling.
Someone pounded on the front door. It went on and on and on, fists landing on the front door in hammer blows that made Vianne flinch.
Sophie came running down the stairs, clutching Bébé to her chest. “Maman!”