Odette stood, taking the lobster into the kitchen. “Be as grouchy as you like. I am going to celebrate.”
Emma considered her empty glass. Apparently her supply of retorts was drained, too. Hearing pans banging, she called out. “How does one cook those ugly things?”
“Many methods,” Odette answered from the kitchen doorway. “But for once the best way is also the easiest: boil twelve minutes, perhaps with a diced onion.”
“What should I do with the other one? Who would eat such a thing?”
Odette scanned the ceiling as if counting something up there. “The Argent couple, I suppose,” she announced at last.
“I thought you disliked them.”
The café owner shrugged. “Not them. Their money. But the woman must be near her time. She’ll need meat to nurse.”
Three mansions stood apart on the hillcrest, the land sloping away in broad lawns to the bluff, then steep to the sea below. Two of the buildings wore crowns of thorns, wires strung in all directions, trucks and half-tracks parked on the grass, giant flags curling and snapping from the balconies, a bustle of officers in and out like hornets from a nest.
The third one, between the others, sat dark and quiet, a great face of stone and ornate windows, its sole sign of habitation a thread of smoke spiraling into a June sky that was as gray and lumpy as the underside of an abandoned mattress.
Emma leaned back against her shoulder harnesses, to prevent the wagon from gaining momentum and careening off the bluff. Mémé hummed to herself in the back, wagging her feet back and forth in large shoes with their patchwork of repairs.
But there was Monkey Boy, oddly enough, prancing outside one of the command posts like a caprice, until a soldier turned and spoke, at which the lad bolted like a colt.
Emma slowed to observe. There was something about the boy’s manner, something more than the usual oddness. He turned sideways and began a skipping circuit of the mansion, sidestep, sidestep, from the seaside terrace to the bluff.
For a moment it appeared as though he would go all the way off. The guard called out, and Monkey Boy turned at the edge and smiled. He reached into his bag and produced an apple, which he held toward the soldier at arm’s length.
The guard spoke again, and Monkey Boy returned to the terrace in the same sidestep fashion, tossing his head side to side like a rag doll. Reaching the soldier, he offered him the apple.
By then Emma had pulled up to the third mansion, but her suspicions were fully aroused. Placing a block behind one wheel to keep the wagon from rolling, she moved toward Mémé but scrutinized the boy. She knew the local apples were cultivated for Calvados brandy, making them far too tart to eat.
The soldier accepted Monkey Boy’s gift, and took a hearty bite. He winced then, puckering from chin to forehead, while the boy clapped his hands and skipped away. Once he had rounded the corner of the great house, the capering changed again, back to that methodical sidestep. As he tottered out of sight, Emma wondered what it was all about.
“Silly boy,” Mémé said.
“Yes, dear one,” Emma answered. She untied both of Mémé’s shoes, sliding out the laces and placing them in her lap. “You put these back together, and I’ll return in one minute.”
Mémé scowled. “Work.”
“Sorry,” she said, kissing her grandmother on the crown. “I’ll try to improve.”
The old woman did not answer. Already she was threading one lace through a shoe’s eye, her tongue poked out in concentration. Emma grabbed the sack with the remaining spider, marched to the mansion’s door, and swung the great brass knocker.
The young man Argent pulled the door open with a finger to his lips. He wore round spectacles and appeared deeply tired. Emma stood in the foyer for a moment, adjusting to the gloom, aware of a quiet so deep it felt as though someone had recently died. Although it was the fifth of June, the place was chilly and damp: those high ceilings, all that stone.
She followed him to the kitchen, where coals glowed in the hearth. He stirred them with a poker, then reached to a ready pile of broken chairs, backs and legs and arms pointing this way and that like debris from something violent. He took pieces and triangled them on each other in the hearth, and in a moment the wood caught and the room began to warm and brighten.
Then Emma noticed, on an intact chair, a woman wrapped in a blanket, her hair down and face beatific, a bundle in her arms. Emma approached, and saw that the woman was nursing.
“Two hours old,” the young man said. “Our miracle.”
Not a miracle in the least, Emma thought. All it required was mating, for which, based on the evidence, humans apparently possessed an abundant appetite.
“She’s dozed off,” the mother whispered. “Here, you must hold her.”
“No thank you,” Emma said, backing away.
“But yes,” the father said, lifting the baby, placing it in her arms.
The infant weighed nothing and did not move, yet Emma struggled, elbows awkward and shoulders raised, until her hands found their place and settled. She had never held a newborn before. The mother rose from the chair with fragile dignity. As the blanket trailed behind her, she waddled to a wide chaise by the window and lay down.
Emma thought this was the most exhausted person she had ever seen. Tucking the blanket around herself, the mother curled up like a dog after a long hunt. Emma studied the miniature being in her arms, a little eggplant, bones and a wrinkled brow like an old man, yet possessing such a powerful calm. A deep, deep quietude.
The father stood at Emma’s elbow. “Isn’t she beautiful?”
Emma gazed at the baby, her tiny upturned nose. One hand curled outside the blanket, little fingers with tiny fingernails.
What were they thinking, to bring a child into a time of war? What did they imagine her life would be like? An impulse surged in Emma, to murder the girl then and there, to smash her head against the fireplace stone, or wring her neck like one more chicken destined for the pot. Spare her a lifetime of misery. Save her parents from the folly of hoping for good things on her behalf. Protect the whole village from wanting something as unlikely as an infant’s well-being.
“You are the first person other than her parents to hold our baby,” the father continued. “Her name is Gabrielle.”
Emma found it difficult to speak. “Is that a family name?”
“No, mademoiselle. After the archangel Gabriel.”
“Why did you choose him?”
“Because she will be the one who tells our story,” he said, adjusting his spectacles. “Gabriel was God’s messenger, who delivered news of salvation. Long after you and I are gone, the child who was born into this broken world will be our messenger to the future. She will describe how it was in this time and place, what happened, and how we survived till the Allies came.”