My Brother's Crown (49 page)

“I know.”

“Life goes on,” Grand-Mère said. “Valentina is proof of that. So is your marriage to Pierre. Despite the tragedies,
Dieu est bon
.”

“
Oui
,” God was good. He'd been faithful even as she had doubted. He had cared for her even though she had been foolish.

Next, Catherine, Jules, and Pierre worked out the marriage contract. It was simple. The dowry her father set aside for her would be sent by Jules from Lyon once Catherine and Pierre were settled, and Catherine would work with Pierre and his parents to establish a business, most likely a print shop. The couple would honor God and each other, striving to glorify the Lord in all things.

Catherine wrote it out, and then she and Pierre both signed it. As her guardian, Jules did too.

“I don't have a ring for you,” Pierre said regretfully.

Catherine touched the cross around her neck. “It's all right. This is all I need.”

Before the sun set, Pastor Berger married Pierre and Catherine along the river. She wore the gray dress, a white lace head covering, and the silver Huguenot cross around her neck.

Pastor Berger read a passage from Isaiah.
The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose.
The Plateau was often referred to as the wilderness, the desert where the persecuted fled, where they were exiled. With her family here, it did not feel like a wilderness to Catherine, not anymore. It felt like a place of safety. For a moment she wondered if she and Pierre should stay, but she knew in her heart it was not where God was leading them.

Versailles, in all its opulence, felt far more like a desert than the Plateau. Dry. Unsustainable. Full of facades. A place of danger.

As Pierre repeated his vows, she held his hand. They would be refugees and strangers in a new land.

“Do you, Catherine…”

For all those years she had thought she would marry Pierre. And then she did not. And now she was.

“… take Pierre Talbot?” the pastor asked.

“
Oui
,” she answered. It
was
what she wanted. In that moment she felt the starry-eyed wonder of her youth again.

“Do you have a ring?” the pastor asked.

Catherine shook her head, wishing they had asked him to take the question out.

“I do,” Pierre said, taking something from his pocket. He held it in his fingers until he slipped it on her finger.

It was her grandmother's ring, the one with the ruby her grandfather had given his wife all those years ago. Catherine turned toward her.

“It would have been yours anyway someday,” Grand-Mère said. “It's better coming to you now from Pierre.”

“
Merci
,” Catherine said, looking at her grandmother and then her husband.

“You may kiss your bride,” Pastor said.

It was a gentle kiss, sweet and tender with a hint of the passion that was yet to come.

After the service, Catherine wrote out the marriage certificate under Pastor Berger's direction and they all signed it. When it was done, he said that he and his family would not be going to England with Pierre and Catherine after all. “We would rather go farther into the Plateau,” he explained. “I think that will be a life better suited for our boys.”

Jules said he would send them with Waltier the next day. “I have arranged for a wagon full of hay to be taken to a farmer I know just beyond the village of Portes. He's expecting it.”

Madame Berger had a smile on her face.

“Dress accordingly,” Jules suggested.

“Oh, I will,” she answered. “Wrapped in a blanket. And praying I don't sneeze.”

The others drifted into the front room of the house while Pierre and
Catherine stayed at the table, their marriage certificate and a bottle of wine between them.

“Do we need to talk more?” He reached for a lock of her hair that had escaped from her lace head covering and then leaned toward her.

“
Non
,” she said, smiling at him. “Maybe.”

“About?”

“I don't know.”

He took her hand again, but this time led her up the staircase. Instead of going down the hallway, he stopped on the top step and pulled her down beside him, putting his arm around her and pulling her head to his shoulder.

Tears filled her eyes. “I'm sorry for doubting you,” she whispered. She had been tricked by Eriq's bravado and by his deceit. And it had made her doubt the person she had loved most in all the world.

“Don't be sorry. It couldn't be helped.”

“But I am. And I am sad for all it has taken from us.”

He put a finger under her chin, lifting her head. “Things will be better than they were before. We'll be together with no secrets between us. We have survived adversity. We have changed, but it has made us stronger and better prepared for what is ahead.”

He no longer smelled of paper and ink, but of smoke and wine, mixed with the mountain air. She relaxed against him for a moment, taking in his warmth and his wisdom. He was right. They had both changed. Her heart surged as she turned her face up to his. He drew her into an embrace as they kissed, his hand on the nape of her neck. When he released her, she stood, pulling him up to the landing and then toward the bedroom.

Before dawn the next morning, Catherine lit the candle at the desk and wrote a bit more in her journal while Pierre—her gentle, generous, passionate Pierre—slept in their marriage bed behind her. After she recorded the details of her wedding and hopes for their future, she stacked the pages in order and tucked them safely into her satchel.

Grand-Mère would not be able to read this record of her life until now and her private thoughts about all they had gone through recently, but someday Valentina would. Catherine knew what it was like to lose a mother. She hoped Amelie's daughter would find a measure of comfort in this glimpse of her own mother and an understanding of what led her family to Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.

At dawn, on the eighteenth of June—the Eleventh Monday of Ordinary Time—Catherine told Cook and Estelle goodbye. Then Grand-Mère and Valentina. Finally, she turned to her brother.

As she reached to kiss him, he interrupted her by thrusting a pamphlet into her hand. Puzzled, she examined it. It was one she had seen in the print shop on Thursday of Holy Week, titled
A Collection of Verse for the Encouragement of Young Men and Women
.

“This awful thing?” she said, flipping through the pages. “Why are you giving it to me?”

“
Excusez-moi?
” Jules replied, feigning deep offense. “Pierre and I worked very hard on that.”

Her brow furrowed. “What? The two of you made this? Why?”

Pierre explained. “It's one of the ways we have helped guide our people to freedom. What looks like an ordinary pamphlet actually contains information about how to make it safely out of France—including various routes, safe houses, and secret allies along the way.”

Stunned, Catherine flipped through the pages but saw nothing of what he described. It was merely a collection of drawings and poems. “Where?” she demanded. “How?”

Taking it from her, Pierre turned to the page featuring the poorly rendered sketch of the horse. “For example,” he said, “if you look closely, you'll see a map hidden in the animal's flank.”

She stared at the drawing for a moment and then gasped. “This line here, this is the escape route?”

“
Oui
, one of them,” Jules replied. “And here, where the poem refers to ‘Galloping in the noble meadows by moonlight before coming to rest in a grand place that fits like a glove'? What that says is that it's safe to move quickly through the rural areas outside Grenoble as long as you travel at night. Your goal should be to find a Monsieur Grand
at the glove factory, where you will be given food and safe shelter for a day.”

“Really?”

“Trust me, the information is all there in the words if you know what to look for. ‘Noble' means ‘Grenoble.' ‘By moonlight' means ‘only at night.' Those who have been given the pamphlet have been instructed what to look for.”

“And this works?”

Both men nodded.

“Just last week, for example, I got a letter from one of the families we recently helped with it,” Jules said. “It was a drawing by one of their children—a picture of a house with a yard and a stable and a rope swing—and at the top, they had written, ‘
Bonjour
from Bern.
Merci beaucoup.
' ”

Catherine shook her head, truly amazed. As a work of art or poetry, it left much to be desired, but as a hidden key showing the way to deliverance, it was a work of genius.

“
Merci beaucoup
from me too,” she said, clutching the pamphlet to her chest. “I will treasure this.”

Pierre put an arm around around her. “I'm so sorry,
chérie
, but once we reach England we will have no choice but to burn it. Because it can incriminate sympathizers and get them thrown in jail, we have had to guard it carefully and insist that it always be destroyed the moment those who have been using it reach safe haven.”

“Actually,” Jules corrected, “I think we should let this one copy survive. We should preserve it for the future so generations can better know how their forbearers managed to escape. Always keep it safely hidden, but eventually give it to your children, for their children.”

Pierre nodded in understanding and Catherine reached, again, to kiss her brother's cheeks. This time he cooperated.

As he pulled away, he winked at Pierre and said, “Besides, this particular one is special. It has a coded message to my sister inside.”

Then Jules looked to her, and for the briefest of moments a smile flickered in his eyes, the old smile she knew when they were young and he had not shut her out of his heart.

Astounded, she thought of their code-breaking game from when she was a child. She looked again inside the pages, this time spotting the familiar circles. One last message from her brother. She would decode it tonight, once she and Pierre safely reached their first stop.

She looked around at the faces of family once more, committing the moment to memory. The time had come to be packed into the wagon among crates of paper with her beloved Pierre—her husband!—and be driven by Monsieur Roen on the overland journey to Rochelle, where they would then board the ship for England and their new life together.

Wherever God may lead them, she knew they were safe within His hands.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-E
IGHT

Renee

O
n Monday morning, the morning after our big discovery in the Dark Woods, my cousins and I got ready for the day and then went to the main house to talk to Nana together. We were feeling nervous but also excited—not to mention more than a little defiant. We had no idea how she would react, but now that the four of us had been vindicated, we didn't really care that much.

Or at least that's what we told ourselves.