He digs into his food, eating like a starving man, which is likely not far from the truth. He tells us he dove from his ship just before it was sunk, swam in icy water for hours before he was rescued by three British soldiers, and then was taken captive. He managed to escape in late September, and has been traveling by night ever since.
“How did you eat?” I ask, grinding my teeth not to cry. Now that he’s here, and safe, I’m finally able to picture how awful it must have been.
His eyes—the softest green—meet mine. “I managed, little thief. But I’m so glad to be home.”
* * *
I draw him a bath and then take the children upstairs to bed. When I return he’s still in the tub. “You have no idea what a luxury clean water is,” he says with a laugh, “and warm water, no less.”
My eyes fill at the sight of him there and I go to the tub’s edge. “I’m shocked the water’s so clean.”
“I’ve had to empty and refill the tub twice,” he admits, and then his crooked grin fades. “What happened to Jeannette? If you stayed back because of the children, she must have died before the bombings even began.”
I sigh. “I’m not sure we’ll ever know. She went to Paris two days before we were due to leave. There was a stampede at the train station and many people died, but I have no idea. And by the time I knew where her mother lived, the whole block had been destroyed. But someone could come for them after the war. There might be aunts and uncles,” I tell him, before taking a deep breath. “I won’t give them back if that happens.”
His tongue darts to his lip, considering what I’m saying. “Legally, I’m not sure you’ll have a choice.”
“I don’t care what the law says. Anyone who would take children from the family that’s raised them for more than half their lives doesn’t deserve them.”
He presses a kiss to my forehead. “You’re my wife in spirit, if not in name, and I trust your decisions,” he says.
My eyes sting. I’m not sure I deserve his faith. In fact, I know I don’t. But I feel so unspeakably lucky to have it. I kiss him, unable to say all the things I’d like to say. “Give me the pitcher and I’ll wash your hair,” I tell him.
He hands it to me, and I fill it with clean water, trying not to look at his naked lower half. He’s exhausted and half-starved from his journey, so certain things may need to wait.
I tip the pitcher over his head and fill it again, before lathering the soap in my hands. He groans as my fingers press to his scalp.
I still. “Am I hurting you?”
“Just the opposite,” he says. His hands rise to clasp my face and pull my mouth to his. He holds me there, exploring me with his lips and his tongue, dragging his teeth over my lower lip on his way to my neck. “Christ, I’ve missed you. Night and day, for months, I’ve missed you. And now you’re here and it seems almost too perfect to be real.”
“Henri,” I gasp, as his lips pull at the skin of my neck, “I have to rinse your hair.”
He slides under the water and then emerges, climbing to his feet and towering above me—leaner than before, bruised and glorious. I want to eat him whole.
It must show in my face.
He grins at me. “I can work with this position, but I sort of pictured us starting off in bed.”
* * *
I wake nestled against him. He is too warm and too perfect to be a dream, yet it still doesn’t feel quite real. Will there ever come a time when I don’t wake grateful to find him here? It’s hard to imagine.
Lucien rises and comes into the room before our clothes are on. “This will be an adjustment,” says Henri with a raise of his brow, holding the blanket to cover himself as he searches for clean clothes.
By the time I’ve dressed, Henri has a fire roaring on the hearth, and sits at the table with Lucien in his lap while Cecelia is being helped down the stairs by her adoring big sister.
“We don’t have coffee anymore,” I tell him. “Or sugar, I’m afraid.”
He smiles at me. “I have my family,” he replies. “That’s all I need.”
I feed him eggs and bread and the last of the canned ham and watch him eat with the same sort of delight I once felt when Cecelia was finally taking a full bottle. When he’s done, he plays with the children: chasing Lucien around the room on all fours, growling, swinging Cece up in the air and catching her in his arms, and teaching Charlotte to play jeu de barbichette, a horrible game that involves reciting a rhyme—and hitting the first person to laugh.
I frown. “What kind of game encourages children to hit each other?”
“French games,” he replies with a grin, “and this one was always my favorite.”
“And what happens when she plays that at school and gets expelled for slapping someone?”
He laughs. “Are all people in your time so soft?”
“Yes,” I tell him, but it feels like a lie as soon as I say it, and my smile falters. People in my time are soft, but I no longer am, not the way he thinks.
* * *
“You’re happy again,” says Charlotte when I put her to bed that night.
I smile. “Wasn’t I always happy?”
She shakes her head. “No,” she says. “You were waiting to be happy.”
A chill runs up my spine. She’s right. I had moments of happiness here with them, but they were brief. I was waiting for Henri to come home until I took a full breath, and once we’re settled in England and he leaves to fight, I’ll wait once more. If he dies, I’ll wait forever because there’ll be no other option.
“I don’t want you to fight,” I whisper to him much later, as we both lie awake in the dark, unwilling to be separated by sleep. “Once we are settled in England, I want you to stay with us.”
He rolls to face me. “I can’t hide like a coward and let others fight for my country. But I’d never have gone if I’d known you would remain here, so defenseless.”
I laugh unhappily. “Defenseless? You know what I can do. There isn’t a woman in France better defended than me.”
“Except you’re no longer interested in defending yourself,” he replies. “You’re defending them, and in that you are as vulnerable as the rest of us.”
I want to argue but a part of me can’t deny what he’s saying. “There’s not much to be done for it now,” I tell him. “We’re here and we’ll have to deal with it as it comes.”
“Yes, but you can be prepared if nothing else,” he argues. “You need to know how to defend yourself. And how to kill.”
I freeze. Henri can’t conceive of the version of me who stabbed her own aunt in the chest or allowed people to burn alive, who wanted Yvette to die and even considered killing Dr. Nadeau when I discovered he’d lied to us about the penicillin, and I hope he never does. That part of me was successfully locked down when Cece was born, and I’m not letting her back into the light.
“I don’t want to learn how to kill,” I reply.
“And I don’t want to have to teach you how, but now it’s necessary,” he says. “We’ll start small. I’ll go hunting and you can come with me.”
My heart pounds in my chest. How would he look at me if he knew? Would he forgive me? He might. He’d excuse it as self-defense. But what if he really understood where it came from? My grandfather and aunt are the reason his mother is dead. They’re people who wanted to hurt others, who enjoyed it. And there is a part of me, a part I sometimes feel pulsing just under my skin, that wants that too.
“No,” I reply. “I can’t leave the children to go, and I’m not interested anyway. That’s just not who I want to be.”
“You realize I’ve killed men, yes?” he asks softly. “Do you judge me for it?”
“Of course not. You were at war.”
His hand glides through my hair. “And, if someone comes here to take the children, will you not be at war too? You had a gun in your hands the night I came home.”
I squeeze my eyes tight. If the children were hurt or threatened, there would be n
o end to my rage, to my need for revenge. But until that time, I want to remain who I am: a person who went to a dark place and came back from it. A person capable of evil but refusing to give in. “That’s different,” I whisper.
“Only because it’s hypothetical,” he replies. “Once it happens it won’t be different at all.”
I stretch alongside him, allowing my hand to splay across the flat plane of his stomach. “Is this really what you want to discuss with me right now?” I ask, as my hand begins to slide lower.
“Yes,” he says with a groan, “but I suppose it can wait.”
36
SARAH
Our lives don’t change dramatically with Henri home. He will be arrested if the Germans know he’s here, so he and Lucien and Charlotte still can’t be seen and we still need to listen, always, for the sound of approaching cars. But he fills us, as if our family was a slightly deflated balloon and he’s a huge burst of air. He sets traps in the woods to augment our paltry staples, and because he’s here, I can finally go into town, using our pathetic ration cards and a little bit of our money to buy food on the black market. His presence also means the world to the children, Lucien in particular, who never even met his father. For the first time in his life there’s someone around to wrestle on the floor and carry him on his shoulders.
I love having him home, and I love that, with him back, I’m no longer in this alone. Regardless of what skills I’ve acquired over the past year, I’m still only twenty-three. I need opinions other my own, and there’s no one alive whose opinions I trust more than Henri’s.
We go over the situation at night, once the children are in bed, and agree that we need to get out of the country. The “free zone” is hardly that—there are Germans in every town, and Jews are losing their jobs and their businesses everywhere. As no ships can sail out of Calais now, we will either need to get on a ship from Marseilles—more difficult, as the Germans are unlikely to let Henri board—or we can go through Spain to Lisbon and leave from there. But in order for that to happen, we need travel papers, ones that claim no one in the house is Jewish.
“I’ll ask around,” he says. “My Paris contacts will probably have gone underground. But there’s always Monsieur Roche in town.”
My teeth sink into my lip. I’ve only met Roche a few times, but he’s never struck me as either helpful or trustworthy. “Are you sure it’s safe to let him know Charlotte and Lucien are here? Is it safe to let him know you’re here?”
“For enough money, Roche will keep anything quiet,” he replies. It’s a struggle to accept that answer. Not when the children’s lives—and his—are at stake.
“People can be so much worse than you think,” I tell him, looking at my hands. Iris wasn’t merely the sister my mom disliked. She was evil, almost inhuman. My mother was a liar. Mathilde and the guards all looked perfectly normal but were willing to kill innocent women and newborns for a paycheck. And he has no idea how bad I am either. “You can’t trust anyone.”
He comes to where I stand. “Of course you can,” he says. “I trust you.”
I’m not sure you should. I keep the thought to myself as I rest my head on his chest, but something in the way he stiffens makes me feel like I said it aloud.
* * *
At the end of our first contented week together, I sit in the chair near the fire to give Cece her evening bottle, and Henri sits on the couch across from me, with Charlotte beside him and Lucien in his lap, telling them a bedtime story. His stories are normally about three children named Charlotte, Lucien and Cece, who go on amazing voyages and wind up living somewhere made of candy.
Tonight’s story, however, is different. He tells them about a distant island, lost in the middle of a stormy sea, with waves so huge that no ship’s captain dared approach for fear his boat would be dashed upon the high cliffs. “But one day a boat did arrive,” he tells them. “It was a rickety boat, and no one understood how it had survived the water, much less the waves, but it had. Aboard the boat were four girls. They were dressed strangely and claimed to remember nothing of the journey or their life before it, aside from their names.”
“What were their names?” Charlotte asks excitedly.
He grins. “No Charlottes in this bunch, I’m afraid,” he tells her. “Their names were Lea, Scylla, Aisling and Adelaide.”
My head jerks up. Adelaide. The woman Katrin told me we were descended from. The start of the first families—four families, four gifts. Could it be the same story? It must.
“The four girls,” he continues, unaware of my surprise, “were taken in by families in the village. Eventually, each fell in love, and married. But no children came, and one by one they each went to the priest seeking answers, and he told them no children would come until they left the island, because they’d each been given a gift, one that was meant to be shared.”
Charlotte’s small face falls. “But were they able to come back?”
“That’s what the girls asked too, because they were sad about leaving. And the priest told them, ‘You will all return home when the circle is complete.’”
“So, did they?” asks Charlotte. “Did the girls ever come back?”
“Pieces of them exist all around you,” Henri replies, “waiting to be called home. I feel certain they’ll get back eventually.”
“But where did they come from?” she persists. “They had to have parents.”
“No one really knows,” Henri says. “No one knows how that boat could have survived the storm, either. Perhaps it was magic.”
“I don’t believe in magic,” she replies. “If magic was real, someone would stop the bad things from happening.”
“Personally,” he tells her, “I believe that when the circle is complete, there will be enough magic in the world to do just that. Maybe that’s the reason it exists at all.”
Charlotte continues to ask questions and then complains bitterly at how unfair the priest was as we take the children upstairs. I lay Cece, now heavily asleep, in her crib and then, after pressing a kiss to Charlotte and Lucien’s foreheads, follow Henri to our room.
“Is that where the first four families came from?” I ask. “The woman who escaped with Marie—Katrin—she told me she was a daughter of Adelaide.”
And that I was too. I wish I could tell him.
He shrugs, unbuttoning his shirt. “It’s the story our mother always told us, growing up. And maybe it’s a fabrication, but most origin stories seem to contain an element of the truth. I hope so, anyway.”
I do too, except if it’s right, I’m not sure how the pieces will ever come together. Luna Reilly, who was brave when I was not, may have been the last of her line. And since I can’t have children, Adelaide’s line may end with me. I perch on the end of the bed, feeling as if there is something important in what he said, something I’m missing. “What did you mean when you told Charlotte the girls could go home when the circle is complete?”
The shirt comes off and the undershirt follows. For the first time in the years I’ve known him, even the sight of his perfect, bare chest isn’t enough to distract me. “There are time travelers who believe that being a part of the prophecy confers some kind of immortality,” he says. “That they will all go to the island in the end.”
“I wonder if that’s what Coron was after,” I say. “I thought maybe he wanted to produce an army of time travelers, but maybe he just wanted to assure his place in their afterlife.”
Henri’s mouth tips into a sad smile. “If that’s true, then many people died over a fairy tale.”
“So you don’t think it’s possible?”
He crosses the room and pulls me to stand. “I don’t need to believe in any kind of afterlife. I’m happy with what I have right here and now.”
His hand weaves through my hair, pulling me forward so that his mouth can press to the top of my head. I’m happy with what we have right here and now too. But that doesn’t stop me from wishing I could keep it forever.
&
nbsp; 37
SARAH
December comes. Henri speaks to the few people he trusts in town about getting travel papers, but comes up empty-handed, which leaves us stuck with only one option: Monsieur Roche. Henri heads to the woods to meet him one afternoon. The danger for him is much greater than it is for any of us—he’s as likely to be shot as arrested if he’s caught.
I wait for his return, feeling sick to my stomach, and rush toward him when he walks through the door, only to freeze at the sight of the bloody bag he holds. “Rabbits, for stew,” he says, but his smile is strained.
“What happened? Is he going to get us papers?”
He closes his eyes. “It seems Roche has got himself into some trouble with the British. He doesn’t want money in exchange anymore.”
I stiffen. I don’t trust Roche. “Then what does he want?”
“He doesn’t have all the details, but the Brits need some airmen escorted to the Pyrenees.”
My anger bubbles. I close my eyes, trying to rein it in. “Why can’t Roche take them himself if he’s created this problem?”
“Because it’s dangerous,” Henri says with a sigh, “and he’s banking on the fact that someone will be desperate enough to do it for him.”
“Which you’re not,” I reply.
He rubs a hand over his eyes. “I know, little thief,” he replies. “I’ll look for another way. But we can’t hide in the open forever. It may be our only option.”
“If that happens, then I’ll take them. I can do things you can’t. I can escape.”
Henri shakes his head. “Absolutely not,” he says. He gives me a small smile. “You weren’t even willing to hunt rabbits. Larger prey might prove quite a struggle for you. We’ll find another way.”
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