by Suzanne Weyn
Emma sat on the chair and faced him. "You saved me from the well. And you saved Kid from the pond. I know you did! I saw one of your crazy cures on his side."
"That doesn't make me a frog."
"We both saw something large swim up at us from below."
"I told you, I'm a great swimmer. And I have my ways of gettin' around. Why don't you let it be and stop asking so many questions?"
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"Why must you be so mysterious and strange?"
He shrugged his shoulders and grinned. He enjoyed teasing her. "It's my nature, I 'spose. I probably get it from my mam. She made some folks nervous too."
"How'd she die?" Emma asked.
"Caught the malaria while she was tending to sick folk in the swamps. She told me what to do for her, but there was a couple of ingredients I couldn't find in time." He looked away from Emma. He never liked remembering how he had scrambled to find the things she told him to get and couldn't. "It's somethin' I still feel real bad about, though I know she forgives me."
And he did know. "When I'm dreamin', I sometimes try to direct my spirit to her spirit. We talk. She helps me with cures and the like. It's not easy to explain. She helped me to get better from the gas."
He himself didn't know if these were dreams or if his spirit really transported. The dreams felt so real and he had gotten much better after each time he dreamed his mother had worked a cure on him.
"You're lucky to know you're forgiven," Emma said softly, and explained how her mother had died in the attack. "I couldn't help my mother when she needed me. I wish I knew that she forgave me."
"There was nothing for her to forgive. It wasn't your fault."
"I know," Emma said as tears overfilled her eyes, spilling down her cheek. "Still ... it feels as though there should have been something I could have done."
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"There wasn't," he assured her, "there was not a thing you could have done."
"I'd really love to see my father again, and now I'm so frightened that they'll shoot us before that happens. Or maybe he'll be shot, you know, if they attack England. Maybe we'll all--" Unable to go on, she buried her face in her hands as tears rushed forward.
He came and perched on the chair beside her, rubbing her back. "You cry, Em. Go ahead," he said. "It'll do you good."
Nodding, she buried her tear-drenched face into his chest. With a sigh, he stroked her soft hair and let her weep there. Somehow he knew that these tears were touching him more deeply than even her kiss would have.
That night he pretended to sleep in the chair, listening to her breathing over on the bed, waiting to be sure she was asleep. The rain continued to pound down, making it hard to hear. Not even moonlight lightened the complete darkness.
Just when he was sure she was asleep, she surprised him by sitting up and crossing in the dark to him. "We have to get out of here and tell someone at Allied command what we heard today," she said.
"We don't have to go," he disagreed. "I've been sitting here thinking about it all this time. The world's gone insane. I was insane myself to sign up. All we have to do is survive until this ends."
It was only part of what he'd been thinking.
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Despite the insanity he planned to go and tell what he knew, but he had to go alone. If he reported the information to the Allies and returned in time before he was missed, that would be best. He'd travel faster without her, and she'd be safer here. He might have to travel far, and the rain was torrential. He wasn't sure how much territory the Germans had claimed; he couldn't know for sure which direction was best.
But he couldn't tell her. She'd insist on going with him.
"How can you say that?" she questioned. "Don't you feel any loyalty to your fellow soldiers?"
"You haven't seen the things I've seen, Em. Things I don't want to talk about because if I tell you it'll give you nightmares for the rest of your life, the kind of nightmares I'm going to have forever. This war has changed me for always." That much was absolutely true.
"We can't sit here and do nothing," she objected.
"Sure we can," he disagreed. "What's to stop us?"
"It's wrong not to try," she insisted.
"Who says? It seems to me there's a wrong thing happen' every second of every day right now. Who cares if we do a wrong thing?"
She rose indignantly. "Do what you please. I have to try to get word to someone." She gathered her clothing and began pulling things on over her nightgown.
In her top dresser drawer, she searched in the dark until she found the locket and put it around her neck. "This time I won't be back," she told him.
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"There are two guards at the door. How do you plan to get out?" he asked.
"I'll go down the chimney like you do."
"Have you ever climbed down a rock wall before?"
"I can do it."
"In those high-heeled boots?" he scoffed. "And I wouldn't recommend doin' it barefoot, either."
"I'll find a way," she said.
"Listen, Emma," he said, gripping her arm. "You're goin' to get killed out there. I'm tellin' you, don't do it. What if I go and you stay here?"
"Then we both go together," she suggested.
"No," he insisted.
She shook his hand off. "I'm going. I don't care if you want me to or not!"
"Stubborn idiot!" he cried, walking away from her toward the bathroom.
He'd hoped to slip away once he knew she was asleep. Now she was acting exactly as he'd expected she would. Fortunately, he'd prepared for this possibility and knew what he'd have to do--as much as he hated to do it.
"Do you think that just because your life in London was safe that nothing can hurt you now?" he argued, turning toward her.
"What do you know about my life?" she came back at him, furious. "At least I've been taught values like loyalty and patriotism. What would a swamp rat like you know about that?"
"Nothing!" he replied coldly. "Nothing at all! I
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guess someday I'll have to go ask the queen."
She followed him into the bathroom and turned on a dim nightlight. She pulled open the closet and began pulling out the shelves.
"Hey, Em." Jack came silently behind her. He really hated doing this.
She turned around to him. He held his palm flat out horizontally, tipping it up to her. It was filled with a grayish powder, a concoction he'd made from a bat's wing and other ingredients for just this moment, should it prove unavoidable.
"What?" she asked, annoyed, as he blew the powder into her face.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN Fire
Emma awoke and realized she was lying on the bed, on top of the covers, still dressed in her clothing, even her boots. Blinking in the dark, it took her a moment to recall what had happened but, when she did, she sat up quickly. She turned on the light at her bedside.
Outside in the hall, she heard soldiers speaking German to one another. Beyond the windows was the incessant pounding of rain. But Jack was not in the chair, and she didn't detect any sound of him moving anywhere in the bathroom.
A note propped against the lamp base caught her attention. It was a rhyme:
Jack Sprat's a real swamp rat
But on his wife he would not lean.
He ran away
So safe she'd stay
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While he went to scare the queen.
"To scare the queen?" Emma pondered the meaning of his words. Did he mean he'd gone to tell the Allies the bad news? It would scare them, but of course they needed to know.
She continued to read:
Did Jack the rat
Climb out like that?
No, he acted like a hedgehog.
But have no fear--
He'll persevere
Through the muddy bog.
It's no problem for him
If he must, he'll swim
For he's not a rat or hedgehog
--he's a
frog!
A breeze chilled her, and she saw that the bottom of the window had been opened just enough for a man Jack's size to slip through. Several knotted bedroom sheets had been tied together and fastened to the dresser at one end. The other end had been passed through the window opening.
Emma pocketed the note and got out of bed. She went to the window for a closer inspection. Peering out, she saw the white sheet bouncing in the rainy wind along the outside wall. Had he taken it all the
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way to the bottom? Why would he do that and risk being seen when he could go down the old chimney?
The bedroom door flew open, flooding the room with light from the hall as Colonel Schiller stomped in flanked by the two guards who had been stationed at the door. "Frau Sprat!" he barked. "Where is your husband?"
"He won't get far," Colonel Schiller said with a smirk on his face. He stood by the open window and sneered down at Emma as she sat on the big chair. The soaked line of bedsheet had been hauled in and now lay coiled, making puddles on the floor.
"He will, no doubt, head north to the other side of the forest. Our men regained that farm road only yesterday. I've sent a soldier with a message to our field commander there to look for him. Our troops will pick him up. And if he stays off the road, he'll wish he hadn't."
"Why is that?" Emma asked tensely.
"The mud in the fields out there will swallow him whole. The farmers have already lost sheep and pigs into it. It nearly engulfed an entire ambulance yesterday. It will suck him right into the ground. You had better hope we pick him up first."
"Will they bring him back here?" she asked.
"Yes, and then we will shoot him."
Emma leaped up from the chair. "No! Why? You can't blame him for wanting to escape from this prison. It's my fault. We quarreled terribly. I said
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cruel things to him. He was simply desperate to get away from me."
"A lovely performance, Fräulein Winthrop, but I know better."
"That was my name before I was married," Emma attempted to cover. "But now--"
"It was a pleasant joke, I am sure," Colonel Schiller interrupted. "I do not like to be made a fool of, however. We intercepted this bag of mail being smuggled in by a captured Belgian soldier. In it we found this letter addressed right here to the estate."
He took a letter from inside his jacket and Emma instantly recognized her father's neat, curved handwriting. It had been torn open along the top. "That's mine," she insisted, reaching for it. "Give it to me, please."
He handed her the letter. She scanned it quickly. It was full of encouragement so loving that it nearly brought tears to her eyes.
"He says that he hopes you will all live to see happier days, like your wedding day, perhaps," the colonel pointed out.
"My husband and I eloped," Emma told him, but he simply raised a dismissive hand to her and she knew he didn't believe it. "All right, we're not married, but Jack is an American and you can't just shoot Americans for no reason."
"We can do what we like to spies for any reason," he countered.
"He's no spy!"
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"He is a spy. And so are you!"
He took a folded paper from his pocket and handed it to her. "One of our informants works for a butcher at the market. I assume you gave him this on your last day out." Before she had even completely unfolded the paper she saw that it mentioned Oliver Twist. "I don't know what this is," she said.
"I suppose those numbers mean nothing to you?" Colonel Schiller said skeptically. "Please, Fräulein, do not insult me further."
She gazed down at the line of numbers. "Is this some sort of code?" she asked.
Colonel Schiller's face began to color with fury. "Do not pretend that you do not recognize this book code. You know very well that each number signifies a letter on the designated page. Your hand is clearly in this. You brought this book from the library downstairs, did you not?"
"I had nothing to do with this. Why do you think it even came from this room? I can't work this message out," she insisted. "What does it say?"
"It says too much about my men and how we are supplied!" he shouted, pounding his hand on the dresser with rage.
Emma began to understand what had been happening. Jack had been going outside and learning things about the fortifications the Germans were bringing in: the cars, tanks, munitions, extra food, even the reinforcements of soldiers who were arriving daily. He probably even saw things when he was
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downstairs cutting hair. Claudine and Willem knew things too.
Then he wrote what they collectively knew, using the pages of the book as some kind of code template. He got the coded message to Claudine when she brought the meals. Claudine and Willem then passed it on to their friend the butcher, the man she'd seen them talking to at the market. He must have had some way of passing it on from there.
Slow reader. She cringed remembering how she'd passed that judgment on him. All the terrible things she'd said to him tonight, accusing him of indifference, of cowardice--it killed her now to remember them. What a fool he must have thought she was! A snobbish fool!
Emma heard talking in the hallway, and one of the guards came quickly into the room. One of the staff officers from the day before was downstairs requesting to see Colonel Schiller. Scowling at her as he turned to go, he slammed the door behind him.
Emma took the rhyme from her pocket. Did Jack the rat climb out like that? No, he acted like a hedgehog.
She understood! He was telling her that the window setup had been to mislead the Germans into thinking he'd gone out that way. As long as they thought that, they wouldn't search any further for a way out.
But he'd really taken the passageway out. That was what hedgehogs did, they moved through underground tunnels. This passage, although not
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underground, was a tunnel. He was telling her that she could still use it if she needed to.
She did need to use the passage--as quickly as possible too. She had to catch up with Jack before he became bogged down in one of those fields.
Glancing at the clock on the dresser, she saw that only forty minutes had passed since she'd attempted to leave. If she took the horse path, she might make faster progress than he did and maybe she could catch up to him. She could at least warn him not to go out into the mud that was sure to suck him down and swallow him whole.
Emma stood on the edge of the dark passage behind the wall and struck a match. The stone of the chimney flue lit up before her. Lighting the lantern she'd brought in, she hung it on a nail jutting from one of the thick wooden beams.
She had brought along the same knotted rope sheet Jack had used to fake his escape out the window. This time, she hoped, it would really do the job. She fastened it around the beam, tying it firmly. The other end, she tied around her waist. She'd attempt to climb down the chimney flue shaft as Jack had done, but this would give her some added safety should she slip.
"Here goes," she murmured, lowering herself into the black pit. Inch by tenuous inch, handhold by tense handhold, groping in the dim light for the next spot to place her foot, she slowly descended. At first, the light from the lantern was sufficient but as she went farther
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from it, her progress became increasingly difficult.
Her fingers were soon scraped and raw. Her shoulder muscles ached with the strain. But she kept descending, determined to put the misery out of her mind.
Several feet lower she cried out in pain. A twisting cramp clenched the muscles from the arch of her foot and ran up her calf muscle. The sudden spasm caught her by surprise and she lost her grasp on the wall. In seconds she was tumbling down the dark shaft.
Then she bounced up again, letting out a gasp of shocked air. The sheet held her swinging there, feet and arms dangling like a puppet.
With a terrible tearing sound, it dropped her several more feet. She braced for the impact. But the tear wasn't comple
te, and the sheet rope held for a while longer at least.
Below, she heard soldiers speaking loudly in the kitchen. Light seeped through the boarded area. She was only about twelve feet from the bottom.
Kicking out, she was able to touch the sides of the chimney with her toes. By rocking harder still, she reached the wall again. With one hand, she untied the sheet from her waist and continued the slow climb down.
Once at the bottom, she saw that her way out was blocked by the presence of the soldiers carousing in the kitchen. She didn't have the luxury of waiting. Although she'd plumped some pillows under the blanket to look like her sleeping body and shut the
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lights, she couldn't be certain Colonel Schiller wouldn't return, demanding to speak with her. And if she waited too long, she'd never catch up to Jack.
She paced in a small circle, not knowing what she should do next.
"They have rats in this place," one of the German soldiers declared. "You can hear them running through the walls!"
Emma froze. She hoped he was referring to the noise she was making and not to any actual rats.
In the darkness she realized that an even darker shape was behind her. With hands extended, she felt her way to it. It was a hole, a break in the stones of what must have once been the back wall of the fireplace.
Forcing herself not to think about rats, she climbed through the opening. It led to a wide, turning tunnel with a dirt floor. In places there were pieces of stone, as though this was some very old part of the estate and these had once been wide, winding stone steps.
Emma followed it down to a vast underground room filled with bottles. Lifting one from a shelf, she blew dust from it. The label said it was wine that had been bottled in 1760. She wondered when anyone had last been down here. She'd never heard her parents speak of it.