“They will never come,” Emma said.
“She will tell it better than you or I could,” he continued, as if Emma had not spoken. “Because she cannot recall, as we do, what life was like before this war. These circumstances are all she will know. Thus she will be the perfect voice for our time.”
Emma held the bundle out, handing the baby to her father. “That is quite an expectation of someone so small.”
“But she will have her own private professor,” the mother called from the chaise. “Her own schooling, here in this kitchen.”
“Also,” the man added, one finger raised. “This is the size at which all of us begin. Fools and heroes, paupers and kings. All were babies once.” He lowered his face till his nose touched the child’s. “And so lovely.”
Emma could not imagine any of this happening for her: Philippe returning home intact, the means and opportunity to marry, a secure home, the lovemaking, a healthy pregnancy. Every stage of the sequence was impossible, the whole of it inconceivable. No, Emma thought, she might as well be barren.
“I must go,” she said. “But I brought something for you.” She dropped the sack on the table, a sound like castanets. “Boil it for twelve minutes and you’ll have decent meat.”
The professor bowed. “We are grateful.”
But he did not open the bag. Instead, Emma watched as he crossed the room and climbed onto the chaise with his wife, who slid her hips back against him, the child snuggled between them like a cat. Emma wanted to shake them all, slap them awake, pull them outside and make them see. The hornets in the mansions next door were proof enough of what lay ahead. This child would not be an angel, delivering news to the future. She would suffer, she would be hungry. How did these parents not understand?
No, they sighed with contentment, murmuring to each other on the chaise. Emma turned away, hurrying through the chilly entry, back out into the day.
A squall of rain hit her face like thrown water. After threatening all morning, the clouds had finally opened. But no, that was a stray gust. Emma realized the weather was more like a fog. Mémé sat on the wagon yet, ignoring the drizzle, growling with frustration at her shoes.
“Are you all right?” Emma asked.
“Almost,” the old woman answered, fidgeting, thumbing a lace through the last remaining hole.
“Let’s see how you’ve done,” Emma said, examining the finished shoe. It was fully laced, but Mémé had done it in the opposite direction, top to bottom rather than bottom to top. Emma laughed in spite of herself. “A beauty, that’s what you are.” She wrestled the shoe onto Mémé’s foot, tying a knot at the base of her toes.
Mémé leaned closer to see if she recognized this person, uncertain but also not afraid. There was something about the confident way the young woman handled the second shoe, a competence, which earned her trust.
For a moment sun winked through the teeming clouds. Emma raised her head to see if there was a rainbow—no such good fortune—before noticing that Mémé’s face was lifted in the identical way. The drizzle had left drops all over her wrinkled skin. They glinted in the brief light, an illumination. It was as though her grandmother belonged to some aboriginal tribe, in some remote place, whose elders adorned themselves with swirls of glass fragments, lines of tiny diamonds.
Chapter 24
They propped the door open always, in all seasons and weather, so that they could see in advance who was coming. Marie would speak to no one but her daughter, and then only in murmurs. Fleur—so beautiful at fourteen that most men and many women could not help pausing their conversations as she passed—kept house, kept watch, kept her hands buried in her patchwork apron’s pockets.
On the afternoon of the fifth of June, Emma steered the wagon to make sure its wooden wheels crossed the cobbles at the edge of their lane, which rattled Mémé in the back but meant that people inside the house would hear the rumble of her approach.
Fleur appeared, an apparition in the doorway, so there was no reason for anyone to enter, nor any way to see inside. Slipping off the harnesses, Emma reached into her pocket for a stone, the one she had picked up when Guillaume was executed, and handed it to Mémé for a plaything while they did their business. The old woman passed the stone from hand to hand, then reached a bent arm backward to balance it on her wrist.
“Good day, miss,” Fleur piped. Her voice rang as high as a bird call.
“Good day,” Emma said, eyeing the girl sidelong. She was pale, a blue vein visible on her neck. She was also, Emma had to concede, even more stunning than her reputation: an earnest face, high intelligent brow, a cascade of hair on her shoulder.
Emma marveled at how the occupation squandered the beauty of youth. No men but occupying soldiers would see this girl. No boy of the village would admire her from afar, in silent torment before working up the nerve to say hello. Emma knew her own moment of blossoming had passed with the departure of Philippe. Here was this young creature, no doubt in need of a hearty stew and a month of sleep, but possibly as lovely a vision as the village had ever known. Yet it would all go to waste.
Not an hour after holding a newborn and feeling despair, Emma tasted renewed bitterness like vinegar. Fleur as yet had no breasts, flat as a boy and with no hips, but these would come with time. What would not come was a suitor, or the dozens of them that this beauty deserved. No infatuation, no courting, no stolen kisses. All she had was a broken mother.
“How is Marie today?” Emma marshaled the self-control to ask while rummaging in the bags of her cart.
“Like a saint, thank you,” Fleur replied. “Always silent and mostly at prayer.”
Not knowing how to answer, Emma kept to business, producing an egg and one third of a baguette. “I brought some things for you.”
“You are so kind, miss. No one has enough, yet you always have extra. How do you come by these things?”
“Like a saint, with silence and prayer.” Emma smiled. “Plus the occasional dodge.”
Unlike every other person in Emma’s network, the girl did not reach for the food. She plunged her hands into her apron pockets and stared at the ground. “Everyone else has shunned us.”
“They have no reason to do so.”
“No?” Fleur spoke in low tones. “My father executed, my mother disgraced? And those women’s hands ruined in the making of Dog Hill?”
“Those evils are not your doing. They were caused by the occupying army. All of the wrong lies with them.”
The girl raised her beautiful face. “Are you with the Resistance?”
“No. I am simply trying to survive, and to help those I can.”
Fleur removed one hand from her apron pockets, holding it out. “I thank you sincerely, miss. We will take the egg, please.”