Water Song (4 page)

Emma felt deeply relieved an hour later when the door opened and white-haired, stout Claudine was unceremoniously shoved inside. In her arms she held towels and a blue ceramic bowl. The pockets of her ruffled white apron bulged with supplies from the kitchen. She cast a look of resigned misery at Emma and said something consoling in Flemish.

The kind, motherly words, although unintelligible to Emma, made unexpected tears spring to her eyes. Part of her longed for Claudine to wrap her in a hug, but that was not their relationship and Emma quickly wiped her eyes.

With a glance at the lightly snoring soldier on the bed, Claudine crossed to the small, closet-size bathroom in the back of the bedroom, an addition Emma's mother had had installed three summers past. That same summer she'd had electricity and running water installed. She'd been so excited by the improvements, saying that just because the estate was built in the 1600s, it didn't mean they had to live like they were still in the past.

Settling in next to the soldier on the bed, Claudine began to gently wipe away the grime on his face. She folded a dry hand towel and laid it over his puffed eyes, fixing it there with white surgical tape.

Emma watched Claudine tend the American while she sat curled in a large, upholstered chair. Claudine tended the soldier so efficiently, her old-woman's hands moving deftly as she stripped his clothing while keeping him covered modestly with the blanket and cleaning him without his even awakening, that Emma wondered if she'd ever been a nurse. From a tall chest of drawers, the old woman produced a pair of Emma's father's pajamas and practically swept them onto the soldier's body while he continued to slumber under the blanket.

Claudine finished by running a brush through his coarse, black hair. Putting down the brush, she stroked his forehead and spoke kind words to him in her own language. She was moving away from the bed when the soldier's hand snaked out from under the blanket and encircled her wrist.

The sudden, unexpected gesture made Emma gasp sharply, but Claudine seemed unfazed and leaned in to hear the young man better. Her hand over her thumping heart, Emma bent closer to hear.

"Merci beaucoup, madame,"
the soldier whispered to Claudine.

A German soldier came into the room and signaled for Claudine to come with him. Emma continued to sit in the chair after Claudine departed, watching the sleeping American, his face illuminated by a patch of sunlight pouring through the window.

I wonder what he looked like before he was so injured,
she thought. She really couldn't tell. Why was he fighting with the British? Surely only a very strange person would sign up to fight in a war that he didn't need to enlist in.

She thought about his request that she kiss him, and a glance at his blistered lips made her shudder at the idea. What kind of person could think of kissing while in such a state, nearly dead and a prisoner? And of kissing a woman he didn't even know, at that?

Maybe he'd been delirious or shell-shocked or something similar, she thought, softening toward him slightly for a moment. But then she threw off the charitable benefit of the doubt she'd granted him. She shouldn't give him too much credit. Most likely he was just a crude lowlife who enjoyed making her uncomfortable with his rude remarks, even while lying at death's door. He no doubt thought her an English prig and found it a great laugh to see her squirm.

She should have left him there in the well for the Germans to find. Maybe he'd have gotten away if she>hadn't hauled him up and then she wouldn't have to be bothering with him now at all.

You went all the way down into the well and you didn't even get your locket back,
she chastised herself. Thinking of the locket still down in the well made her wonder anew what was in that sealed compartment. If there was ever an emergency--a valid reason to break it open and finally discover what precious thing was inside that might help her--this was it.

On the fifth day of her captivity, Emma awoke at dawn from the wide, upholstered chair that she'd been sleeping in to find the American lying on his side in the bed staring at her. For the first time, the towel that Claudine replaced three times daily when she came in to tend him and bring meals did not cover his eyes.

"Stop staring at me," she snapped. "It's rude."

"A cat can look at a queen," he replied smoothly, and again she heard his low, scratchy, Southern-inflected voice.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means there's no harm in lookin', especially at someone as pretty as you."

"Well, I'm no queen, and you are certainly not a cat," she said.
No indeed,
she thought.
You're ugly as a frog! Didn't I find you at the bottom of a well? No such luck that you'd be something as lovely as a cat!

In the last five days he'd mostly slept. While he slumbered he'd sometimes broken out in a feverish sweat and had wild, frightening dreams that caused him to cry out. He'd awoken Emma in the middle of the night screaming in a way that brought to her mind the agonized sounds she'd heard the evening of the gas attack.

"You're feeling better?" she asked, pushing a lock of disheveled hair from her face. She'd decided to try again to get on a better footing with him. They were stuck there together, after all. It would be more bearable if they could be civil to each other.

He opened his mouth to reply but before he could, the sound of a terrible explosion made him look at her with questioning, alarmed eyes.

"They've been fighting out there for five days," she told him. "The shelling has been relentless. Ground troops fire machine guns at one another all day. Hand grenades, too, I think. I don't know more than that because I haven't seen a newspaper since the Germans took over the estate."

"So I guess I'm a prisoner of war," he surmised.

"No. They don't know you were fighting with the Allies because you had no uniform on, only your long underwear. They know you're American from your accent. I told them that you lived here with me. By the way, what's your real name?"

The slightest smile appeared on his lips. "Jack Sprat."

"Oh, do come on," she chided.

"John W. Verde, from New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. of A., but serving in Her Majesty's army."

"Don't say that too loudly," she warned, glancing anxiously at the closed door. "As I said, they don't know you're a soldier. I told them that you're my ... my ..."

"Your what?" he asked.

"Servant," she lied.

"Oh no, you don't. That's not going to stand. I'm nobody's servant," he objected, rising onto his elbow and this time staying elevated.

"Telling them that saved your life," she pointed out firmly. "I'm pretty sure they would have shot you, otherwise."

"I don't care! We goin' to set that straight, all right," he insisted, looking as though he intended to attempt getting out of the bed.

"Calm down," Emma urged, getting out of her chair with her blanket still wrapped around her.
"I didn't
really say you were my servant. I told them you were my husband."

"Then why'd you lie to me?"

"I don't know. The other thing ... the husband thing ... it was a bit awkward."

A slow grin spread across his face. Emma didn't at all appreciate the cat-who-caught-the bird quality she saw in it. It made her feel very much the trapped bird. "So we're married now, huh, sug," he said, still grinning.

She stepped closer to him so as not to be overheard but made sure to stay beyond his grasp, remembering how quickly his arm had snapped out to take hold of Claudine. "We certainly are not!" she whispered emphatically. "We are prisoners of the Germans and if they find out you're an enemy soldier, I don't know what they'll do to you. That's the only reason I said you were my husband."

"Why are they holding
you
prisoner?"

"They don't want me telling everyone that they're here. And I know how this house runs--or at least they think I do, though I really haven't the foggiest idea. Claudine and Willem do all that." She twisted her hands together anxiously. Explaining their predicament to him somehow brought the full reality of it to her.

"Don't you fret on it, princess," he said.

"Don't call me that," she objected. "I'm not a queen and neither am I a princess."

"You look like one to me," he insisted. "And this sure seems like a castle."

"It was built for one of my mother's ancestors in the sixteen hundreds but it was never a castle," she explained. He seemed determined to cast her as a haughty aristocrat and she resented it fiercely. The fact that her family had money was certainly neither a crime nor a reason she should be mocked.

"You sure this ain't a castle?" he pressed.

"Positive. And now the Germans have turned it into a military garrison. It's obvious why they wanted it. Besides the fact that it's huge, it overlooks miles and miles of fields below it."

"We'll be all right. I been in tighter spots 'an this," he said. "When I was twelve, I did time in the Waifs' Home in New Orleans."

"Waifs' Home?"

"Sort of a cross between an orphanage and a junior prison for kids on the street who broke the law. My friend Louie and I got thrown in for blowin' off firecrackers in front of a fancy hotel on New Year's Eve. I don't think our sauerkraut-eating friends here can top that experience. Man, they were tough in there. And almost as soon as I got out I was nearly picked up by the police again. Only by then I was too old for the Waifs' Home. I had to hop on out of town real fast then."

"You're a wanted criminal?" Emma cried, aghast. That would certainly explain why he was fighting with a foreign army. He was hiding from the police! Could this get any worse?

He chuckled as if it were all a joke to him. "I was over by a Storyville honky-tonk an' I'd just slipped in without payin' the admit fee to hear a guy playin' his blues guitar. I like music. In the home, my pal Louie taught me to play the cornet like he did. They were teaching him trumpet in there, but I never could play the way he did. But from Louie I got to appreciate jazz and the blues."

"Did the owners call the constables because you sneaked in?" Emma asked.

"You could say that. The owners told the police I was pickin' pockets just to have me ejected because the police wouldn't bother with sneak-ins. But then they recognized me from the Home and they decided I must have been a pickpocket, after all.

There was no way I was letting them take me to jail, so I broke loose and jumped right into the Mississippi."

The memory of his watery escape made him chuckle sleepily, which set off a fit of coughing. When it subsided, he went on. "I had to swim a fair bit before I caught up to a riverboat and climbed aboard. Those tides are powerful, all right. Good thing I swim as good as any frog; can hold my breath longer than anyone in my parish."

"Parish?"

"You might call it a county," he explained. "They held an underwater swimming contest once when I was ten years of age and I won, stayed under longer 'an fellas as old as fifteen."

The world he was describing was completely foreign to Emma. It couldn't have been any stranger if he were describing life on the moon. "How ever did you become a British soldier?" she asked.

"Little by little I made my way north to New York City, where I found some work on the docks there. New York is a rough place but thrilling in its way, and so I stood by awhile. That's why most of my Louisiana accent is changed and faded out now."

Emma smiled at that. "You have enough of it left," she assured him. "I still don't understand how you got to England."

"After a time, I got work as a deckhand on a ship going over to London. Even though the U.S. was supposed to be stayin' out of it, supply ships were coming to England almost every week. The U.S. is sendingtons of food and ammunition here to the Western Front. The waters were filled with those sneaky German U-boats trying to take down the supply ships."

"U-boats? I read about them in the newspaper. What are they, exactly?"

"German submarines," he explained.

"Weren't you afraid your ship would be blown up?"

"Sure was. Our ship just barely dodged a torpedo once."

Emma sighed. "I wish the Americans would join the war. Perhaps this whole mess would be done with if we had the extra fighting power of the U.S."

"A lot of folks in the U.S. want to stay clear of it. But I say it's just a matter of time before the Germans sink one of the American ships. And that's what's goin' to get Uncle Sam into this war."

"I suppose so," she agreed. "I still don't understand how you wound up as a soldier in the British army, however."

"Simple, really. I made lots of runs back and forth across the Atlantic 'cause, even though it was dangerous, I enjoyed making the cash. We got extra for doing hazardous duty. For the first time in my life I had some money," he explained.

"In London, I got to know a lot of Brit crewmen who was enlisting every day. After a while I figured that since I might get shot at anyway, I might as well sign up to be a Tommy soldier and get the uniform."

Surely he was joking!