I sat up, hugging my knees to my chest. He paused. Blinked.
“C Troop, we were the first military through the gates after the medics. We saw a ghost town, like what you and I saw today. But there were living ghosts at Belsen.” He spoke as flatly as Madame Rouffanche had that afternoon, the repetitive cadence of ground-in horror. “Thousands of people, animated skeletons in striped gray uniforms just drifting through piles of bodies. Bodies stacked everywhere like heaps of rag and bone. Even the ones still walking about didn’t look alive. They just—wafted. It was all so quiet.” Pause. Blink. “The sun was shining. Like today . . .”
Tears were slipping out of my eyes again. Useless tears. What good do the tears do all those dead? The ones in Oradour-sur-Glane and the ones in Belsen. James, Rose. Damn the war.
“There was a Gypsy girl lying on the ground,” Finn went on. “I only learned later that she was a Gypsy, because someone told me what her prisoner badge meant. For Gypsy women it was a dark triangle with a Z for Zigeuner . . . She’s not really a woman, though, just a lass. Maybe fifteen. But she looks like she’s a hundred years old, just a wee sack of bones and a bald skull and huge eyes. She’s staring up at me, eyes like stones at the bottom of a well, and her hand is resting on my boot like a white spider. And she dies, right there. Her life slips away as we stare at each other. I’m here to rescue her, my regiment and me—and that’s when she dies. She lives through so much, and she dies now.”
I guessed it was always now whenever he thought of the Gypsy girl. Every time he thought of those hollow eyes and the white spider of a hand on his boot, she was dying in the present, in his head, over and over again.
“I’ve blocked out a lot of it.” His voice had roughened, the Scots burr thick and blurred. “I wasna trying, it just—the details, they blurred. Grave digging, carrying bodies out of huts. Delousing people and trying to feed them. But the Gypsy lass—I remember her. She stands out.”
I had no words to comfort him. Maybe there weren’t any. Maybe the only solace was touch, the warmth that said I’m here. I reached out and took his hand between mine, gripping it tight.
“The smell—” A shudder racked the whole rangy length of his body. “Typhus and death and rot, and liquid shite lying everywhere in pools.” He looked at me, dark eyes bottomless. “Be glad you got here to Oradour-sur-Glane three years after, Charlie lass. You saw the sunlight and the quiet and the ghosts—but you didna get the smell.”
That seemed to be the end of anything he had to say. I poured us both more whiskey. We tossed it down, seeking oblivion as fast as possible. Salut! Rose said, but no, she wasn’t saying anything, she was dead, and so was Finn’s Gypsy girl. I laid my head back in his lap once the room started to spin, and he sat stroking my hair.
The moon slid over the window, getting brighter and brighter until I realized it was the sun and already halfway up, coming through the window in bright rays that stabbed my eyes like swords.
I blinked, trying to get my bearings. I lay tangled up with Finn on top of the sheets, both of us still fully dressed, his arm thrown loose over my waist and my face against his ribs which were moving in and out in sleep. My head was splitting. My stomach lurched as I disentangled myself, and I barely made it off the bed and over to the sink in the opposite corner.
I threw up, and then threw up again, gagging on the sour taste of half-digested whiskey. Soon, Finn was sitting up. “You look a wee bit ill,” he observed.
I managed to glare between heaves.
He unfolded from the bed and came toward me, shirt half buttoned and his feet bare, and he gathered back my dangling hair as I bent over the sink again. “Any dreams?” he asked quietly.
“No.” I straightened, wiping my mouth and reaching for the water glass, not quite meeting his eyes. “You?”
He shook his head. We couldn’t either of us look at the other as we set about washing up. We were like a couple of unhealed stumps trying not to bump into each other, raw and hurting, and I couldn’t turn my head without a jolt of pain. Rose, I thought, and there was another jolt of pain, dull and profoundly shocking. It hadn’t been a nightmare. I had slept, I had woken, and it was real. There hadn’t been any nightmares, just true horrors. My eyes burned, but I didn’t have any more tears.
Just a vast, looming question.
We got ourselves washed and tidied, and Finn brought cups of black coffee wheedled from the proprietor. My roiling stomach grudgingly accepted the coffee, and soon we were back in the car, Finn turning mutely for Limoges. I sat there in my wrinkled day-old clothes, rubbing at my splitting temples, pondering the question now staring me in the face.
What now, Charlie St. Clair?
What now?
It was a quiet drive back. I found myself staring at the city’s summertime loveliness as though it were a stage set: the weeping willows over the river, the half-timbered houses, and the beautiful Roman bridge Rose would have seen when she served drinks at Le Lethe. I had no reason to be in this city any longer—and yet, no destination to make me leave it.
“Wonder if Gardiner’s in,” Finn said. The first words he’d spoken since asking me if I’d dreamed.
I looked at him blankly. “In from where?”
“Her meeting with that English officer from Bordeaux,” Finn said. “Remember?”
I’d forgotten. “Wasn’t that yesterday?”
“Maybe it was.” We hadn’t exactly planned on staying the night in the countryside. What now? The question still echoed. What now?
Finn parked the Lagonda and we trailed inside. The auberge’s entryway had been freshly polished; I smelled beeswax over the fresh flowers on the desk. Roses, pink roses the color of Rose’s cheeks, and my head throbbed sickly. An irritable clerk sat behind the desk, and in front of her was the kind of Englishman who thinks that if he speaks loudly enough, foreigners will automatically understand him.
“EVELYN—GARDINER? Is—she—ICI? Ici, here, comprenez? GARDINER—”
“Oui, monsieur,” the clerk said, with the air of someone who had said it before. “Elle est ici, mais elle ne veut pas vous voir.”
“English, anglais? Anyone?” The man looked around: tall with a graying mustache, perhaps in his midfifties, carrying a gut before him like a badge of honor. A civilian suit, but the bearing of the man inside it was aggressively soldierly.
Finn and I looked at each other, and then Finn stepped forward. “I’m Miss Gardiner’s driver.”
“Good, good.” The man gave an up-and-down glance of disapproval at Finn’s slovenly appearance, but his tone was cordial enough. “Tell Miss Gardiner I’m here, please. She’ll see me.”
“She won’t,” Finn said.
The man stared, mustache bristling. “Of course she will! I saw her at dinner just last bloody night, we were perfectly cordial—”
Finn shrugged. “She evidently doesn’t want to see you now.”
“See here—”