Promise Me This (48 page)

Annie could not seem to curl her finger through the slim handle or grasp the cup. The woman closed her warm hands around Annie’s, helping her to lift the delicate china to her lips. Annie trembled. The woman’s smile was kind, her touch soft, knowing, but Annie did not want to be touched. She could not, must not trust her, must trust no one.

The woman pulled her hands slowly away once Annie had taken a sip of the fragrant tea. “There, there,
ma chère. Ca va mieux, non?
”

Annie’s eyes met the woman’s. The delicately painted cup slipped through her numbed fingers, spilling the amber tea across Annie’s dressing gown, splashing it over her feet. The lovely Limoges cup crashed loudly onto the flagstones, a dozen painted puzzle pieces.

Jean Claude Dubois drew a deep breath. With all his might and to the consternation of his arthritic bones, he pulled the half-burned brush from the roughly hewn cave’s entrance. He hefted his half-filled skin of wine, tucked his last bit of cheese into his tattered pocket, and mumbling to distract himself from the stabbing pain in his knees, crawled through.

Once he turned the corner, the darkness was complete, but the cave opened wide and he could almost stand. Jean Claude probed the rough, wet wall beside him until he found the shelf that held his tin box and the stub of candle he’d melted and stuck in a broken crock. The striking of the match against the stone made him wince, as always. It took three tries before the stubborn little wick caught the flame.

If the man was still there, he would share his bounty. If he had crawled out or died in the night, what was that to Jean Claude? He did not want to share his food or wine, there was so little to be found. But he did not want
le bon Dieu
to strike him from any hope of heaven. He did not want to spend eternity away from his precious Giselle.

Que cet homme est une malédiction. Why could the man not have died or been carried away like the others in the great crash? Why did he have to land in front of my cave instead of where the soldiers could find him and drag him away to be repaired or piled with the others for the burial detail?

At first, Jean Claude thought the man might provide companionship. He might get well and thank him, might find him food and drink, might come back from his day’s work to share an evening bottle of wine. They would laugh and drink and talk of the days that had been. But days became weeks and weeks rolled into months and the man did not truly recover. He became a nuisance and a drain on Jean Claude’s meager pantry.

Jean Claude shrugged. Once he had farmed and raised chickens. He had gathered eggs from his henhouse. Once he had cut wood for his neighbors. But his chickens were requisitioned by the army, and wood had been plentiful for months—trees blasted into firewood, free for the gathering.

His neighbors had gone when the town was told to evacuate—only a few weary firemen and the blood-gorged rats that feasted on corpses remained. There was nothing left for Jean Claude to do but pick the pockets of the dead and gather what he might.

He had no more bread, nor any hope of begging or stealing any. He must do what he had promised Giselle he would never do. He must leave their land and follow
la Voie Sacrée
to Bar-le-Duc, to her sister’s home, and beg her to take him in. He must do that or die in his cave.

But what to do with the man? He could not push him all the way to Bar-le-Duc in a garden cart. He could not leave him in the cave to die.
Le bon Dieu
would know and curse him; he would have no hope of reaching his sweet Giselle. Jean Claude sighed.

He held the flickering light of the candle stub over the man’s blackened and bearded face. The man moaned, tried to open his eyes, but fell asleep again.

For the first four months there had been little moaning, even though the man’s legs were painfully contorted and Jean Claude knew his ribs were broken—how many places he could not guess. When he had tried to set the bones, there had been flickering of the eyelids and words whimpered that Jean Claude did not understand.

The man swallowed the tiny morsels Jean Claude fed him. He was thinner but more alive than before. Jean Claude sighed again.
Que faire?

He pulled the cork from his wineskin and forced a tiny stream of the dry, red wine between the man’s crusted lips and then a stream of water as he had done every day of the six long months. He lifted the man’s head by his matted hair and massaged his throat, encouraging him to wake and swallow.

Jean Claude wound his fingers through the man’s tattered jacket and dragged him slowly through the rough cave, over the rocks and rubble, and into the morning sunshine. Long ago he had traded the man’s uniform for food. Jean Claude could not see that it mattered. The man would not soon be driving ambulances again, even if he lived. If the army found him and restored him, they would gladly give him a new uniform before they sent him out to die on the battlefield. Jean Claude shook his head and mumbled. He had long decided it was a crazy world, a crazier war.

By the time Jean Claude rolled the moaning man onto his garden cart, he was wet with sweat. He found that pushing his garden cart up the rocky hill to the road was the most taxing thing. The blackened, broken man kept falling off one end.

Twice Jean Claude stumbled and lost his balance. In trying to steady himself, he tipped the cart and the man; all three tumbled down the hill, landing in a heap. The man cried out in pain. After the second tumble, Jean Claude was not certain that the man still breathed. That worried him more.

Should he bury the man in the ditch beside the road? Should he drag him up the hill again and leave him in the hope that someone would find him? What if a lorry rolled over him in the dark?

Jean Claude shook his head. He knew Giselle would have cried, “
Un tel sot!
You cannot leave a man by the road!” And then she would have kissed his forehead and his cheek and his mouth, and all would be well. But Giselle was not there, and all was not well.

When at last he reached the road with the cart and the broken man, Jean Claude sat, exhausted. He leaned against the wheel of the cart and buried his head in his hands.

If he waited, he was certain a military lorry would drive by. But what would he say? He could not confess that he had hidden the sleeping man for six months and fed him nothing but red wine and dried bread soaked in the broth of chickens stolen from the army camp.

They would not credit him with having saved the man’s life. They would say, “Why did you hide in the cave and steal from your own army when we ordered you to evacuate?”

They would not understand that he could not leave the grave of his Giselle. Who would tend it? He would not go now but that there was no more wine, no food in his pantry, and the army had no more chickens. No matter which way Jean Claude turned the matter in his mind, there was nothing but trouble for him in this.

At length Jean Claude heard the faraway hum of a motor, like the drone of a bee. In the distance he saw a small dust cloud rising. Jean Claude stood. He dared not be found with the man.

He hated to leave his garden cart. It would have come in handy in bargaining for work and food with Giselle’s sister. But he had no choice; there was no time. Jean Claude scurried, as best his old joints and bones allowed, down the rocky embankment. He tore his pants in another tumble, scrambled to his feet, then ran, stumbling again, toward his hiding place. The motor on the road above squealed to a stop, shooting up bits of rock and dirt, just as Jean Claude pulled the brush from the cave’s entrance. He heard the door of the vehicle slam as he crawled inside, pulling the brush behind him.

Jean Claude scrambled round the corner, crouched, and waited in the dark. How long he waited, he did not know. He sat on his buttocks on the cold ground and told Giselle and
le bon Dieu
all about it.

He confessed that he should never have stolen the chickens, even if he did feed the broken man with their broth. He confessed that he should never have taken the man’s papers with the photograph of the pretty girls and their parents, or the tiny aluminum plate with raised letters that hung about his neck. They were such pretty things. He would have liked to give them to Giselle, when he reached heaven.

He knew now that he’d done wrong. He buried the stolen treasures in the cave so that
le bon Dieu
could do with them as He pleased. Then, too tired to confess more, he curled up on the floor of the cave and slept.

Dusk had gathered when at last Jean Claude peeked round the corner of the cave. He stretched, crawled out, rubbed life into his old knees so he might stand, then carefully pushed brush across the entrance.

Hearing nothing but the sweep of a bat in search of an evening roost, Jean Claude climbed slowly up the hill to the road, searching first one way and then the other.

The truck had gone. The broken man had gone. But his cart remained.

“Mon bon Dieu! Je vous en remercie! Merci!”
Jean Claude cried, laughing quietly. With his sleeve he swiped tears from his weather-lined cheeks and happily shrugged, wondering aloud over
“les façons mystérieuses du bon Dieu.”

His heart lifted, Jean Claude, by the light of a full moon rising, set his feet square on
la Voie Sacrée
and his face toward Bar-le-Duc.

“There is nothing more I can do.” Carol Fondrey spread her hands helplessly across the breakfast table before her son. “She will not respond to me—to me! Never have I been so . . . incapable!”

Phillippe Fondrey had rarely seen his mother distraught. She was not accustomed to exasperation. He smiled behind his mustache to think of anyone daring to ignore her, especially, as she had called her, “a slip of a girl.”

“Do not be impatient,
Maman
. Perhaps she cannot speak. This war does many things to many people.” The dark-eyed soldier waved his hand as though it did not matter.

But it mattered to Carol Fondrey. She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “The matron from the hospital said she was in a terrible lorry accident during the shelling of a field hospital evacuation from Verdun. But she spoke while in the hospital in Paris. They said she spoke until, in one day, she spoke no more. Someone—perhaps a friend—tucked a letter into her pocket suggesting that her inability or unwillingness to speak has something to do with a broken heart.” Carol pressed her hand to her heart, a habit since the loss of her younger son. “But I do not know what, and if I do not know, how can I help her? You must speak with her, Phillippe. You must seek her out.”

“
Moi?
Why not leave her alone? She will gather her wits in her own time.” Phillippe frowned. “And I am home on leave,
Maman
. I wish to rest, to walk in our gardens, to sip champagne—
avec ma chère maman
.” He tickled her fingers.

But his flirtation, normally the delight of his mother’s heart, had no effect. “You can do all of those things—as you seek her out.”

Phillippe sighed. He did not wish to argue with his mother on his first day at home. He stood and tossed his serviette on the table. “I am not a nursemaid,
Maman
. She is your project for the war effort. I have my own, and they are not going well.”

But later that morning, as Phillippe strolled through his mother’s magnificent gardens, an artist’s palette of color oddly untouched by the long war’s misery, he caught somewhere the humming of a sad tune he’d not heard since childhood, a mournful but oddly comforting nursery lullaby.

The gardens covered two acres and were divided into “rooms” walled by an open maze of tall hedges, privets, yews, and age-old English boxwood. Phillippe could not be certain from which direction the humming came, but he followed the winding trails and sharp corners until he believed himself nearby. Gently he pulled apart a flowering hedge, creating enough space to see but not be seen.

On the other side of the hedge in the center of a small garden of blue hydrangea sat a young woman in a simple white frock beside a slowly gurgling fountain. She had pulled down her golden hair and was brushing its heavy coils in long, rhythmic strokes, maintaining a slow accompaniment to her humming.