Jewels (31 page)

“Very well then, Sarah,” he said it carefully, like a great honor, as he smiled at her, and she noticed for the first time that he was actually very handsome. Usually, he looked so serious that one didn’t notice. But as they came out into a sunny part of the woods, for just a moment, he had looked years younger. “You shall be Sarah and I shall be Joachim, but only when we are alone.” They both understood why and she nodded. And then he turned to her again. “Is there anything you need from me?” He was sincere, but she shook her head anyway. She would never have taken anything from him, except the extra food he left her for Phillip. But she was touched that he had asked, and she smiled.

“You could give me a ticket home,” she teased. “How about that? Straight to New York, or maybe to England.” It was the first time she had joked with anyone since they’d arrived, and he laughed.

“I wish I could.” His eyes grew serious then. “I imagine your parents must be very worried about you,” he said sympathetically, wishing that he could help her. “And your husband.” He would have been frantic if Sarah had been his wife, and she was behind enemy lines, but she seemed to take it very coolly. She shrugged philosophically, as he longed to reach out and touch her, but he knew that he couldn’t do that either.

“You’ll stay safe, if I have anything to do with it,” he reassured her.

“Thank you.” She smiled up at him, and then suddenly stumbled on a tree root that crossed her path. She almost fell, but Joachim quickly reached out and caught her. He held her in his powerful hands, and then she steadied herself and thanked him. But for just that instant he had felt how warm she was, how smooth the ivory skin on her arms, and the dark hair had brushed his face like silk. She smelled of soap, and the perfume her husband loved. Everything about her made Joachim feel as though he would melt when he was near her, and it was an increasing agony not to let her know that.

He walked her back to the cottage then, and left her near the gate, and went back to work at his desk for the rest of the evening.

She did not see him after that for a full week. He had to go to Paris to see the ambassador, Otto Abetz, to arrange for shipments of medical supplies, and when he came back, he was so busy he had no time for walks or air, or pleasant things. And four days after his return there was a terrible explosion at a supply depot in Blois. They brought more than a hundred wounded in, and even the staff they had was inadequate to help them. There were wounded men everywhere, and their two doctors were running from one critical case to another. They had mounted a small operating theater in the dining room, but some of the men were so badly burned that no one could help them. Limbs had been blown off, faces torn away. It was a hideous scene of carnage, as Joachim and his staff surveyed the crowded rooms and one of the doctors came to demand more help. He wanted them to bring in the locals to help him.

“There must be some people with medical skills here,” he insisted, but the local hospital was closed, the doctors were gone, and the nurses had gone to military hospitals months before, or fled just before the Occupation. There were only the people from the farms, most of whom were too ignorant to help them. “What about the châtelaine? Would she come?” He was referring, of course, to Sarah, and Joachim thought she might, if he asked her. She was very human, but she was also very pregnant, this would hardly be good for her, and Joachim felt very protective of her.

“I’m not sure. She’s expecting a baby at any moment.”

“Tell her to come. We need her anyway. Does she have a maid?”

“There’s a local girl with her.”

“Get them both,” the doctor ordered him curtly, although Joachim outranked him. And a few moments later, Joachim sent a handful of his men out to the countryside to speak to the women at the farms, to see if anyone would come to help them, or order them to if they had to. And then he got in a jeep himself, and drove down to the cottage. He knocked firmly on the door, the lights went on, and a few minutes later, Sarah appeared, looking very stern at the door in her nightgown. She had heard the ambulance and the trucks coming all night long, and didn’t know why, and now she was afraid that the soldiers had come to taunt them. But when she saw Joachim, she opened the door a fraction wider, and her face eased a little.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” he apologized. He was wearing his shirt, and had taken off his tie, his hair looked rumpled and his face looked worn, and he had left his jacket in his office. “We need your help, Sarah, if you’ll come. There’s been an explosion at a munitions depot, and we have an incredible number of wounded. We can’t manage. Can you help us?” She hesitated for an instant, looking into his eyes, and then she nodded. He asked her if she would bring Emanuelle, too, but when she went upstairs to ask her, the girl insisted that she wanted to stay at the cottage with the baby. And Sarah met Joachim downstairs alone, five minutes later.

“Where’s the girl?”

“She’s not well.” Sarah covered for her. “And I need her to stay here with my son.” He didn’t question her, and she followed him to the jeep in an old, faded blue dress and flat shoes, with her hair neatly braided. She had scrubbed her hands and face and arms, and had covered her hair with a clean white scarf, which made her look even younger.

“Thank you for coming,” he said as they drove back, and he glanced at her with a look of gratitude in his eyes, and new respect. “You know, you didn’t have to.”

“I know that. But dying boys are just that, whether they’re English or German.” It was how she seemed to feel about the war. She hated the Germans for what they’d done, yet she couldn’t hate the ones who’d been hurt, or even Joachim, who was always so decent to her. It didn’t make her sympathetic to his cause, only to those whose need was greater than her own, and she nodded as he helped her from the car, and hurried inside to help the boys she’d been called for.

She worked for hours in the operating room that night, holding bowls filled with blood, and towels soaked with anesthetic. She held instruments, and assisted both of the doctors. She worked tirelessly until dawn, and then they asked her if she would go upstairs with them, and for the first time, as she entered her own bedroom, filled with wounded men, she was suddenly aware of where she was, and how odd it was to be here. There were cots and mattresses on the floor, at least forty wounded men were lying there beside each other, shoulder to shoulder, and the orderlies were barely able to step over them to get to the next one.

She did whatever she could, applying bandages, cleaning wounds, and it was bright daylight again by the time she made her way back downstairs to what had once been her kitchen. There were half a dozen orderlies eating there, some soldiers and two women who looked at her as she walked in, and said something to each other in German. Her dress and hands, and even her face, were covered in young men’s blood, her hair hung in wisps around her face, but she seemed not to notice. And then one of the orderlies said something to her. She couldn’t understand what they said, but it was impossible to mistake the tone of respect, as he seemed to thank her. She nodded, and smiled at them as they handed her a cup of coffee. One of the women pointed to the baby then, and seemed to ask if she was all right, and she nodded and sat down gratefully with the steaming coffee. It was only then that she began to feel her own exhaustion. She hadn’t thought of herself in hours, or her baby.

Joachim came in a moment after that, and asked her to come into his office. She followed him down the hall, and as she walked in, she felt strange here too. Even the desk and the curtains were the same. This was William’s favorite room, and the only thing that had changed was the man who lived there.

Joachim invited her to sit down in the chair she knew so well, and she had to resist the urge to curl up, as she always had when she and hers husband had long, cozy conversations. Instead, she sat politely on the edge of the chair, and sipped at her coffee, reminding herself that in this room, she was now a stranger.

“Thank you for all you did last night. I was afraid it might have been too much for you.” He looked at her with worried eyes. He had passed her frequently in the night, working doggedly to save someone’s life, or just closing some boy’s eyes they had lost, with tears in her own eyes. “You must be exhausted.”

“I’m tired.” She smiled honestly, her eyes still sad. They had lost so many boys. And for what? She had cradled one like a child, and he had held her just as Phillip did, but this boy had died in her arms, from a wound in his stomach. She could do nothing to save him.

“Thank you, Sarah. I’ll take you home now. I think the worst is over.”

“Is it?” she said with a look of surprise, in a tone that startled him with its sharp edge. “Is the war over?”

“I meant for now,” he said quietly. His views were no different than her own, although he couldn’t allow himself to express them.

“What difference does it make?” she asked, setting down her coffee cup on William’s desk. She noticed that they were also using her china. “It’ll all just happen again somewhere else today, or tomorrow, or next week. Won’t it?” There were tears in her eyes. She couldn’t forget the boys who had died, even if they were Germans.

“Yes, it will,” he said sadly, “until all this is over.”

“It’s so senseless,” she said, walking to the window and looking out at the familiar scene. Everything seemed so deceptively peaceful. And Joachim walked up slowly behind her until he stood very near her.

“It is senseless … and stupid … and wrong … but right now, there is nothing you and I can do to change it. You are bringing life into the world. We are bringing death and destruction. It’s a terrible contradiction, Sarah, but I am helpless to change it.” She didn’t know why then, but she felt sorry for him. He was a man who didn’t believe in what he was doing. At least William had the comfort of knowing that he was doing the right thing, but Joachim didn’t. She wanted to reach out and touch him as she turned to face him, and tell him that it would be all right, that one day he would be forgiven.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly, and walked past him toward the door. “It was a long night. I shouldn’t have said what I did. It’s not your fault.” She stood and looked at him for a long moment, as he longed to be near her again. But he was touched by what she had said.

“That’s not much comfort sometimes,” he said softly, still looking at her. She looked so tired now, and she needed rest, or the baby might come early. He still felt guilty for asking her to come and help, but she had done a splendid job and the doctors were very grateful to her.

He took her home after that, and Emanuelle had just come downstairs with Phillip. She looked at Sarah as Joachim left, and saw how tired she was and she felt guilty for not going to help her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to her, as Sarah sat down heavily in an old chair. “I just couldn’t … they’re Germans.”

“I understand,” Sarah said, wondering why it hadn’t made more difference to her, but it hadn’t. They were boys, and a few men … just people…. But she understood more when Henri came to the cottage a little while later. He looked at his sister, and something Sarah didn’t understand passed between them. He nodded, and then she saw his hand, wrapped in bandages, and she wondered.

“Henri, what happened to your hand?” she asked calmly.

“Nothing Madame, I hurt myself helping my father saw wood.”

“Why were you sawing wood?” she asked wisely. It was far too warm for anyone to need a fire, but the boy knew that.

“Oh, we were just building a house for our dog,” he said, but Sarah also knew they didn’t have one, and then she understood all too clearly. The explosion at the munitions dump had been no accident, and somehow, for some reason she didn’t even want to know, Henri had been there.

That night as they were getting ready to go to bed, she looked at Emanuelle as the two women stood in the kitchen. “You don’t have to say anything … but I just want to tell you to tell Henri to be very careful. He’s only a child. But if they catch him, they’ll kill him.”

“I know, Madame,” Emanuelle said, with terror in her eyes for her little brother. “I told him that. My parents don’t know anything. There is a group in Romorantin—” But Sarah stopped her.

“Don’t tell me, Emanuelle. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to accidentally put anyone in danger. Just tell him to be careful.”

Emanuelle nodded, and they both went to their rooms, to bed, but Sarah lay awake for a long time that night, thinking of the boy and the carnage he’d done … all those boys with lost limbs, and faces, and lives that ended so quickly. And little Henri with his burned hand. She wondered if he understood what he and his friends had done, or if he would be proud of it. Officially, what he’d done was considered patriotic, but Sarah knew better. Whatever side you were on, in her eyes, it was still murder. But as she lay there, she only hoped that the Germans didn’t catch Henri, or hurt him.

Joachim was right. It was an ugly war. An ugly time. As she thought of it, her hand drifted across her belly, and the baby kicked her. It reminded her that there was still hope in the world, and life, and something decent to look forward to… and somewhere, out there, there was William.

Chapter 14

ARAH
saw Joachim almost every day after that, not by any prearranged plan. He just knew her walking schedule now, and seemingly by accident, he always joined her. They walked a little more slowly each day now, and sometimes they went to the river, and sometimes to the farm. And little by little, he was getting to know her. He tried to get to know Phillip, too, but the boy was reticent and shy, as his own son had been at the same age. But Joachim was incredibly kind to him, much to Emanuelle’s displeasure. She didn’t approve of anyone or anything German.