by Suzanne Weyn
"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."
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"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
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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."
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"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.
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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
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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!
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"You signed up to fight in order to get the uniform?" she asked incredulously.
"Yeah, you right I did," he replied. "And now I've gone and lost it. Ain't that the sorriest story you ever heard of?"
She didn't believe him. Although he was making a joke of it, a subtle sadness now underlined his
jaunty tone. What didn't he want to reveal? What did this story of wanting the uniform cover? "Why weren't you wearing your uniform in the well?" she asked.
"Stripped it off," he said with a new quietness. "The poison gas was all got up in the threads and it was burning my skin like fire."
He shut his eyes again and his brow furrowed unhappily. Emma could tell that he was experiencing the terrible attack once again in memory.
"Why were you in my well?" she asked.
"Hiding from the gas. I had only one thought, to get under the water and hide from the gas. I can always find water. It's a gift I have. I can hear it singing."
"Excuse me?" she questioned. Singing water?
He closed his eyes with his head back against his pillow. His voice was fading, and he seemed to have worn himself out with talking. "Yes, indeed. Water has a song just like anything else has. If you're able to hear it, you can always find water. Because water is one of the most beautiful things on the planet, its song is one of the most beautiful."
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His eyes closed.
His voice seemed to drift.
"My mam always called me her frog. Maybe it's the frog part that lets me hear the water song."
Emma watched him sleep. What an odd person he was.
She got up and, standing before the dresser mirror, did her long hair up in a bun. In the bathroom, she slipped off her long white nightgown and changed into a white blouse and an ankle-length brown skirt. She slipped her feet into stockings that she rolled at the knee and heeled ankle boots.
When she came out of the bathroom, the stone-faced German colonel was standing in the center of the room facing her.
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CHAPTER EIGHT Frog Dream
Jack wasn't really asleep, only half.
He was aware of Emma's voice in the room and a man's voice. He spoke with a German accent. He didn't like the hard tones of the German and Dutch languages. Even the Flemish, which was softer, had some of the guttural sounds. He heard it in some American dialects, too. Fortunately there was less of it in the liquid sounds of the Louisiana speech. Maybe it was the French influence. He didn't know. They kept talking as he drifted into a dream. ...
He was on a ship, mopping the deck. The sun was extremely bright, scorching his skin. The ship rocked steadily back and forth in a way that made his stomach queasy, which surprised him. He'd never experienced seasickness before. Thinking he might lose his breakfast there on the deck, he moved to the ship's railing--better to spill it into the roiling ocean below.
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He saw a line etched out on the water. For a moment he thought of alligators moving below the surface out in the bayou. Don't take your eyes off that line for a second, he recalled his mother telling him.
He sensed someone beside him. It was Louie, his pal from the Waifs' Home, playing the trumpet sweet as could be. "Hey, Louie. I didn't know you were on this ship," he said. "They taught you real good there in the Home."
He looked back out at the ocean. It was filled with alligators now. He could see the spiny, scaly ridges of their backs coming toward the ship. "Louie, look, there's alligators out there," he said.
But when he turned back, Louie had changed into the young soldier who'd been in the trench beside him when the gas started to spread. Instead of Louie's sweet trumpet, he was blowing a bugle as he often did at dawn and dusk. "Those are not alligators," he asserted in his working-class English accent. "Those are torpedoes."
And then everything was blinding light. Debris flew past him as a blast knocked him off his feet and sent him hurtling through the air.
He fell from the air, tumbling around and around in a circle under the water, plummeting deeper and deeper. Other bodies floated in the water all around him.
From under the water, he heard Louie's trumpet playing all around him and he suddenly turned into a frog as one of the other men on the boat floated past
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him. He grabbed the man's wrist in his long frog fingers and tugged him upward as he swam fast for the surface.
Louie's trumpet became louder and lost its sweet tone. It became the kid's bugle again. And then even that changed to the sound of a boat's blaring horn.
He cleared the foaming surface and pulled the man up with him. Pieces of the shattered ship were everywhere. He hoisted the unconscious man onto a floating piece of door.
The rescue boat blaring its horn came to pick up the floating man, who was another deckhand like himself. But Jack knew that since he was a frog, it was his job to go back down to see who else he could bring to the surface. So down he went, once again.
Jack awoke from his dream with his sheets in a knot around his legs. He wondered if he'd been kicking as he swam in his dream; that famous super frog kick of his that won him every swimming contest. Funny that he'd dreamed of becoming a frog. Probably because he'd just been telling Emma how his mother called him her frog. His big sister Louisa had said that his raspy voice was a frog voice; she was so good to him otherwise that he didn't hold it against her.
So many memories had mixed together in his dream. It was odd, he thought, that he should dream about the U-boat attack on his ship when he'd gone out of his way not to mention it to Emma. It hadn't even been reported to the American public because the politicians in Washington were committed to
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keeping America out of this Great War.
He hadn't told her about the explosion because he didn't want to think about it, much less talk about it. It had been the real reason, though, that he'd signed up.
He saw what a mess the British were in, what they were really up against. He had lived it now firsthand. Later, when he spent the time recovering in the British hospital, he heard more stories from the Western Front, awful, heartbreaking stories.
He couldn't sit by and do nothing to help. The day they released him from the hospital, he'd walked out and gone directly to sign up.
He laughed lightly to himself, wondering if she really believed he'd signed up to get the dowdy khaki uniform with its putty-colored heavy leggings and metal pie-pan helmet.
What a pretty girl she was, and so brave to climb down there and get him from the well. She had a prickly side, he could tell, but it only made him smile. He liked her fire. She was smart, too, reading the papers and all the way she did; speaking German and French so well. He admired intelligent people, often wished he'd spent more time in school.
He got up on his elbow and looked around. Where had she gone?
That colonel had better not be bothering her. He might be too weak to help her now but he intended to be better very soon.
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CHAPTER NINE Mata Hari
The colonel, who told her his name was Colonel Hans Schiller, asked Emma to walk with him around the grounds of the estate. When she'd first encountered him she'd been in such a state of panic, intent on matching his arrogance so as not to seem intimidated. She'd been so focused on saying just the right things that she'd barely been able to take in his appearance at all.
But now she saw that he was much younger than she'd originally thought, somewhere in his twenties. Tall, blond, and with pale blue eyes, he would have been good-looking if she'd been able to forget he was the enemy.
She'd accompanied him out of her bedroom and down the hall to the main stairs leading into the grand foyer of the estate, amazed at the transformation in her home. The once echoing, empty building
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now bustled with German soldiers moving briskly in every direction. Cabbagy smells of meals filled the hallways. Descending the stairway, she saw that the ornate furniture of the elegant main living room had been pushed up against the walls to make space for the rows of soldiers' cots.
At the front entrance, Old Willem was mending a broken panel on the door and nodded to her unhappily as she went by. Emma assumed that he and Claudine had been pressed into service by the Germans.
Once outside, she and the colonel walked side by side without talking. Tho
ugh overcast, the wet warmth of April hung in the air and a balmy breeze ruffled the loose fringes of her hair. Today there were no sounds of fighting or approaching planes. Emma's spirits lifted with the sheer relief of being outdoors after having been confined in her room for so long.
Not far from the well, Colonel Schiller stopped to gaze out over the fields. "The quiet is good, yes?" he commented in German.
"Very good," she agreed, also speaking in German.
He became lost in thought for a moment before he spoke again. "We should enjoy the quiet while it lasts. Your countrymen along with their French, Canadian, and Belgian allies will surely attempt to take this position from us at some point. It is too good a vantage point from which to see the advancing soldiers in the fields below. They cannot afford to let us keep it. They will try to fight us for this ridge."
His words frightened her. She'd seen what had
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happened to Ypres. If a village could be destroyed, so could the estate. "How close will they get?" she asked.
He grinned disdainfully. "Not close at all, if we are successful at defeating them down in the fields. I do not think you need to worry."
Emma felt keenly the uncomfortable divide this situation was causing in her loyalties. She should want the Allies to come very close and take The Ridge. If they controlled the area, she might even make it safely to the port at the French city of Calais, where she could get a boat across the English Channel and finally go home.
Yet she didn't want any harm to come to the estate, or to be in the middle of horrific missile fire and shooting as she had that day in Ypres. She never wanted to experience anything like that again.
"Tell me ... really ... why you were in that well," Colonel Schiller said, glancing into the well.