“You are just like all the others,” Emma said. “Everyone.”
She bent and picked a handful of clover, and held it under the horse’s nose. He smelled it, cropped the bouquet with his fore-teeth, and chewed thoughtfully. She held the rest on her open palm.
Maybe it was that simple: she helped the hungry, she fed an animal. One creature’s weed was another creature’s breakfast, and thus could the village be fed.
“All right,” she told the horse, bending to pick, then offering him more clover. “All right.”
Part Three
Cunning
Chapter 11
This was how the network began. She let them in, one by one. Drops into a bucket of need, poured out in providing. Every day it grew: a candle here, a sliver of soap there. Each person traded in his or her own currency, had his or her own wants, and Emma bested them all with her method for bread. And her occasional willingness to steal.
Only from those who supported the occupying army, however. And in a manner so expert and patient, afterward it remained in doubt whether a crime had actually occurred.
The first victim was that sniveling DuFour. Emma studied his work habits at the town hall, the lazy pace, the arrogant displaying of keys as he locked and unlocked his office, the long lunches he took at home each day. This in a time when most villagers lived with hunger of one severity or other. She could have emptied his office entirely, files, fixtures, and furniture, in the time he lounged and ate. But that would have brought suspicion, arrest, execution.
Instead she waited for a day on which it rained. After DuFour puttered homeward for lunch, she snuck into his office as quiet as a deer. Rolling his chair to the hallway, she partially unscrewed the overhead lightbulb. The long corridor went dark. She placed the chair precisely where it had been.
DuFour minced back to work, one hand on his belly, smacking his thin lips. When he entered the darkened hallway, he threw the switch and nothing happened. He tried repeatedly, then rolled the chair himself and tightened the bulb. Of course it lit right up.
The next day of foul weather, Emma made sure her rounds passed town hall at noon. She needed less than one minute to loosen the bulb and make a retreat. Later the clerk pondered his dark hallway a moment, before bringing his chair over again.
The third time, he strolled outside, a pantomime of bewilderment as he examined the roof and scratched his pate. Emma sat in the doorway of Uncle Ezra’s bakery, not looking behind herself, not dwelling on the boards still covering where soldiers broke the glass. She pretended to repair her boot, a stockinged foot on the step. DuFour glanced at her, his face pinched and wrinkled like a walnut.
“Nothing,” he snapped. “Mind your own business.”
As he waddled back into town hall, Emma bit the inside of her cheek to suppress a smirk.
It took two more days of rain, five in all, before DuFour flicked the switch, glared up at the dark ceiling fixture, and marched with his many keys off to the locked storage closet. He returned with a fresh bulb. After screwing it into place, he tossed the old one onto the papers in his tall metal wastebin.
The next day, Emma with her own fingertips spiraled that discarded bulb into the lamp beside Marguerite’s sewing chair. She wished Philippe were there to share the moment, her little triumph.
But the aging woman had furrowed her brow. “Did you steal this lightbulb?” she asked. “Because if you did . . .”
“It was given to me,” Emma reassured her. “Someone didn’t need it anymore, and made a gift. My idea was that one generosity might lead to another.”
“I had not forgotten.” Marguerite opened the drawer in her side table, removing a packet of tobacco that she pressed into Emma’s hands. Next she reached for the Bible and switched on the lamp. “Let there be light.”
The other invisible crime was one that preyed upon the Monsignor. Emma had not intended to involve him in her barter and trade, but Pierre’s fuel supply was limited, and Yves’s second daily fishing would burn through it like a young man with his first paycheck. Already sixty people had eaten some of his catch. The villagers depended on Emma. She needed an alternative before a quarter of a tank became none.
The occupying army possessed fuel, but none of it within Emma’s reach. Captain Thalheim rode a motorcycle, and the Kommandant’s aide used one when he fetched her bread, but neither machine spent any time unattended. Likewise the occupying army kept its trucks and tanks in a motor pool under the snarling supervision of the quartermaster, a growling hogshead of a man, the largest human Emma had ever seen. Pulling her wagon along the bluff one afternoon, she recognized Yves’s boat plying the waves northward, and knew she needed to find another source.
The next morning she became fortuitously aware of a private matter that the priest had concealed from the entire town. Because her deliveries took her everywhere, at all times of day, Emma had grown better informed than the worst gossips. Thus she spied the Monsignor scuttling behind the rectory in the early hours carrying a bucket of something, and peering in all directions to be sure he was not seen. Emma was no more able to overlook those signals than she could ignore an air-raid siren. She returned while he said morning Mass, sneaking in back by the tall grass. Emma was greeted by a clutch of clucking hens, all delighted by the incorrect supposition that they were being fed again already. The priest, bless his miserly soul, had chickens.
It was a treasure, nothing less: chickens each produced an egg each day, self-regulated their quality by pecking to death any among them who grew ill or showed weakness, and when their productive time came to an end, they made several meals and soup. No wonder the Monsignor was fat in a world of slender.
Stealing was out of the question. A missing chicken would bring investigation, with the potential to unmask her entire network. Oddly enough, among Emma’s calculus, the moral prohibition on coveting—particularly the possessions of a priest—did not enter.
On Sundays the Monsignor said Mass for the villagers at St. Agnes by the Sea at nine o’clock, offering a separate celebration of the blessed sacrament for the occupying army at ten thirty. No one attended both services, but everyone wondered whether he used the same sermon for both Masses, or tailored his homilies to the different congregations. More than once in the rations line, Odette speculated aloud about whether the Monsignor might slant the gospels for the occupying army, downplaying the salvation of all humanity by a Jew.