Tangled Ashes

by Michele Phoenix

  Beck wasn’t sure what she wanted from him. An apology? A more heartfelt thank-you? Whatever it was, he wasn’t inclined to play along.

  After a moment of silence had passed, Jade pulled down on the hem of her pale-blue long-sleeved T-shirt and smiled tightly. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to finish supper. It will be served at six, if you care to join us.” She paused. “Or I can bring a tray up to your quarters for you if you’d rather eat alone.”

  She brushed past him on her way to the stairs, leaving a hint of lily of the valley in the castle’s stale air. He watched her go, her ponytail swinging and her head held high.

  He dropped a pair of pink rubber gloves on the sink when he entered the kitchen half an hour later.

  “You left these upstairs,” he said.

  Jade gave him a look and tossed the gloves into a bucket beneath the sink. “Thank you, Mr. Becker.”

  The kitchen smelled of onions and basil. A thick stew bubbled on the stove, and lettuce floated in a sink full of water under a window with a view on the outside corridor that led to the fruit cellar.

  “So what are you, exactly?” Beck asked, kicking himself moments later for his lack of tact. Nice job, Becker.

  Jade turned to look at him, brow furrowed, and repeated, arms crossed, “What am I?”

  Becker conceded the point. “Okay, that was poorly put,” he said. “What I meant to ask is, what exactly do you do?”

  “Aside from graciously scrubbing the pee off a perfect stranger’s floor?” she asked sweetly.

  Beck paused, trying to guess at the subtext of her statement, then giving up. “Yup, aside from that,” he said.

  Jade turned back to the sink and began to take lettuce leaves from the water, checking each one for dirt and bugs before tossing it in the basket of a spinner. “Well, Mr. Becker, since you ask so kindly, I’m a bit of a . . . what would you call it? A home assistant, perhaps.”

  “Une femme à tout faire?” Beck asked in perfect, albeit québécois, French.

  Jade’s head snapped around, then tilted to one side, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “That’s a good French term, Mr. Becker. ‘A woman who does everything.’ Not the type of French an American student would normally learn in basic language studies.”

  Beck decided he liked the precise and delicate way she shaped her words. It made her English sound somehow daintier and lighter than the language Americans spoke. “I was raised in Québec,” he finally said. “Just until the age of ten, but I thought you should know.” Jade looked at him questioningly. “You know—in case you get tempted to talk about me behind my back or something.”

  “I’ll try not to talk about you at all,” she said with a sweet smile, turning back to the lettuce in the sink. “Yes, I am indeed a femme à tout faire, though the term is often used in a derogatory way.”

  Beck held up his hands. “Hey, no offense . . .”

  Jade looked at him pointedly. “I love kids. I love teaching. I love cooking. I love cleaning. If I can make a decent living doing what I love, I’d prefer to call it a career rather than label it a social status.”

  Beck considered her statement for a moment, surprised again at the fluency of her English. He eyed the clock. Twenty minutes ’til six. He’d miscalculated this move. Twenty minutes of conversation seemed an overwhelming prospect.

  “And you, Mr. Becker? Is your trade a calling or a status symbol for you?”

  Beck opened his mouth for a sarcastic reply, but Philippe and Eva interrupted his retort with a flamboyant entrance into the kitchen. “Jade, Jade! We found a giant snail!” Philippe yelled as he ran up to the sink, the pride of the hunter on his face. “Look!” He held out his prize, a nondescript snail of fairly large size—but to his eyes, it seemed to be a fantastic dinosaur.

  Jade took a step back. “That’s—hmm—that’s lovely, Philippe,” she said, clearly not inclined to get a closer look at the snail.

  “Can we cook him and eat him?” Eva chimed in, her British accent round and rich.

  Jade put a hand to her chest in mock horror. “What?” she squealed. “You want to kill the biggest snail this castle has ever seen?” The children’s eyes grew wider. “You want to eat the largest creature you’ve ever trapped during your fierce hunting expeditions in the woods?” She was making the statements so dramatic that even Beck found himself getting caught up. The children began to shake their heads, her words elevating their common snail to the rank of mythical beast. “You want to slaughter the king of this venerable castle for meat?!” she finished with great flair.

  Eva and Philippe stared, wide-eyed, as her words settled over the kitchen. When they finally spoke, it was in a machine-gun fire of overlapping statements.

  “We’re not going to eat him!” Philippe declared.

  “No, we’re really, really not!”

  “We’re going to make him a crown . . .”

  “And build him a little mini snail castle . . .”

  “And dig a moat around it and put water in it . . .”

  “And call him King Snail.”

  Philippe paused long enough to give his sister a disparaging look. “We can’t call him King Snail.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s too normal,” he said, drawing out the last word. They both stared at the snail for a while, trying to derive inspiration from its dull brown shell. Jade looked on in amusement, and Becker tried hard not to find the scene endearing.

  Eva’s face was pinched in thought, her freckled nose wrinkled with concentration. “I know!” she finally squealed, clapping and skipping a little where she stood. “We can call him . . .” She paused for dramatic effect and lowered her voice to utter, “King Kong!”

  “That’s a monkey,” Philippe said with obvious disdain.

  “Yeah, but it’s a really big monkey,” Beck muttered, surprising himself and earning a surprised look from Jade.

  “It’s a good name,” Eva persisted. “It’s a really, really good name!”

  But Philippe was still racking his mind for a better one. “King . . .” It looked like the perfect name was trapped inside his mind, and the mental constipation was turning his face red. “King . . . Rover!” He punched his fist into the air in victory and did his own little dance. Eva looked like she was about to disapprove of his choice, but she opted to join in the victory dance instead.

  Jade placed a hand at the back of each of their necks and steered them toward the kitchen door. “Great. King Rover it is. Wonderful name, really. Now why don’t you find just the perfect place to put him and call it his castle?”

  The children looked at each other in anticipation of the task ahead. Apparently communicating without words, they both took off running at the same time, in the same direction, yelling, “To the castle!” at the top of their lungs.

  “But come back quickly—dinner’s almost ready!” Jade yelled after them. When she heard no reply, she closed the door and turned slowly to face Beck. “I suppose I’m going to have to go out and fetch them in a few minutes, aren’t I?”

  Beck shrugged. “Probably.” He’d been a kid before—eons ago. He remembered how it worked.

  They stood in awkward silence for a while. “I guess I’ll . . .” Jade pointed toward the salad still floating in the sink and got back to work. “Oh, to be a child again, right?” she asked when a few more seconds of silence had passed.

  “Actually, it’s been so long that . . .” He found himself tempted to pull up a stool and shoot the breeze—and the notion halted him midsentence. For a brief, uncomfortable instant, he realized that the thought of being alone in his apartment seemed less inviting than sitting in the garishly lit kitchen with a woman he barely knew. Jade looked over her shoulder at him with a puzzled expression. Beck allowed the usual mask to come down over his face.

  “I’m going up to my room,” he said, moving toward the door.

  “Will you be coming back down for . . . ?”

  “No.” It came out more curtly than he’d i
ntended.

  Jade bobbed her head, slightly perplexed, and turned back to the sink. “I’ll bring a tray up to you, then,” she said.

  Becker nodded and left the kitchen.

  Beck didn’t drag his bed up the stairs that night. Though the smell persisted, it was much more bearable thanks to Jade’s intervention, and with his window open despite the February cold, he fell asleep fairly quickly.

  And then the dreams came again. Beck’s dreams had alternating plot lines. Some began in a college cafeteria. Others started in the restaurant atop the John Hancock Center. The worst began on a Sunday morning in Maine. All of them ended with Beck jerking awake, drenched in acrid sweat, a horror so heavy in his stomach, so constricting in his chest, that he had to lie still for a while and fight nausea with deep breaths. It was in those wrenching moments, with the images and emotions of his dreams receding like pale ghosts into his subconscious, that Becker felt most agonizingly alive.

  In the early-morning hours of his second night in the castle, Becker reached for the light by his bed, threw back his covers, and let his sweat-soaked body cool. The breeze from the window was wintery and chilled him until he shivered. He neither closed the window nor covered himself again. He preferred the body-numbing cold of reality to the fevered torment of his dreams. After several minutes of the self-inflicted torture, when he could trust his legs to support his weight again, Beck turned off the light and moved from the bed to the window. He draped a blanket over his shoulders and stood by the old-fashioned radiator, looking out.

  A heavy fog covered the castle grounds. He could barely discern the circular patch of grass around which the driveway curved. The two guard towers, standing at attention on either side of the château’s front gate, were eerie sentinels guarding the property with gun-slit eyes. The fence, a collection of wrought-iron spikes, ran along the road outside the castle grounds. It stood at least eight feet tall and was mounted on a low stone wall that curved in a perfect arch. If it meant to intimidate, it did a fine job.

  It was only after his eyes had adjusted to the dark that Becker noticed a faint light coming from the gatehouse. It shone, wavering, out the side window. A candle, perhaps, or light from a fireplace. Beck thought he saw a figure crossing the lawn in the fog, heading toward the stables with purpose and stealth—no more than a moving shadow in the stillness of the night—but he couldn’t be sure. The fog swirled on a soft, cold breeze, and the apparition vanished into the mobile gray.

  Becker pushed the window nearly closed and returned to his bed. He held a hand up in front of his face. It shook visibly. He needed a drink—he needed it badly. But he’d been so busy during the day with planning and shopping for supplies that he’d forgotten how difficult his nights were without booze. He lay back, an arm bent behind his head, and tried to keep himself awake by planning for the work that would begin in just a few hours. As long as he didn’t sleep, he wouldn’t dream. And as long as he didn’t dream, he’d be okay.

  Morning came as a relief. So did the smell of coffee and eggs wafting up the stairs from the kitchen. Becker got up quickly after merely dozing for a good portion of the night and rejuvenated his spirits with a long, hot shower. His mother had always told him that a cold one would do even better to wash away the cobwebs in his mind, but he wasn’t willing to test her theory quite yet.

  He entered the kitchen with still-wet hair and the firm intention of being civil, which usually required limited contact with humans. His resolution teetered a little when he found Thérèse sitting at the table. Jade was slicing bread at the counter.

  “Good morning,” he said, stopping just inside the kitchen’s archway, eyeing the pot of coffee still in the percolator and the pan of eggs on the stove. He glanced at Thérèse, who sat starchily across from the twins. She nodded her greeting. The twins watched him with a mixture of awe and caution. He looked at Eva. She immediately averted her gaze, dropping her chin and letting her eyes drift toward her brother. When Beck looked at Philippe, the six-year-old crossed his arms and stared right back. He was wearing the same outfit as his sister, though his sweatshirt was blue and hers was red. But the jeans and sneakers were pretty much the same.

  “Shouldn’t you be reading or writing or something?” Beck asked. He wasn’t crazy about talking to kids, particularly not first thing in the morning.

  Eva, whose hair was pulled back on the sides with barrettes that matched her sweatshirt, leaned across the table toward him and spoke in a secretive voice. “Jade said we don’t have to start until eight thirty. That way she can make breakfast for everybody and get it cleaned up.”

  “Yeah?” Becker wasn’t exactly pleased by the news. “Sounds like a good reason to eat somewhere else,” he muttered. “That way you two can start your lessons earlier.”

  Eva’s eyes widened. Eating in another room was apparently frowned on. But Jade turned from the counter with a basket of bread in her hands and deposited it on the table with a smile that held a bit of a challenge. “You, Mr. Becker,” she said, “are a grown-up. You can eat wherever you like.”

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll take it in my office, then.”

  Jade’s smile got deeper and, somehow, a little icier too. “I’ll bring it right in,” she said with utter courtesy.

  Becker turned toward the door.

  “In case you’re wondering,” came Thérèse’s shrill voice, “I’m waiting on a crew from the satellite company in Chantilly. They’re sending someone over to install the dish. Should be here any minute.” Her voice trailed off as Becker slipped out of sight. He was fairly sure he heard her harrumph and the children giggle before he closed the door.

  Jade entered his office a few minutes later, holding a tray loaded with breakfast. Beck was sitting at the desk, having moved it closer to the window for better light, and was finishing the sketch he’d started the day before of the elaborate woodwork of the staircase. He didn’t look up when she asked, “Would you like it on the desk or on the coffee table?”

  “Coffee table’s fine.”

  She deposited the tray on the marble slab that sat on brass legs and turned to Beck, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her wraparound apron. She wore a plaid skirt in browns and beiges and a deep-green cardigan that made her already-dark eyes seem an even deeper shade of walnut brown. Her slender feet were clad in low-heeled pumps. The better to run after the twins, no doubt. “How’s the smell in your apartment?” she asked, not in the least put out by the lack of eye contact and communication coming from the other side of the room.

  “Better,” Beck said, following the flowing curve of the banister with his charcoal pencil. He looked up. “I’ll actually be tearing most of the floorboards out of that corner this afternoon. Get rid of it for good.” It was a decision he’d reached around dawn.

  “Tearing up the floorboards?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Just . . . tearing them out?”

  He looked up. “Is there a problem?”

  “You can’t tear up those floorboards. They’ve been there for centuries!” There was genuine distress in her voice.

  Becker put down his pencil. “It’s going to happen eventually anyway. It’s no use trying to restore boards that are that damaged.”

  She eyed him with suspicion. “I certainly hope you know what you’re doing,” she said. Something sparked in her eyes. “This castle is like a living organism, and I’d hate to see you amputate something that can’t be replaced.”

  Beck smiled a little at the intensity of her expression and tried to mirror it with his own. “I’ll do my very best not to amputate any major organs,” he said with exaggerated seriousness, like a television doctor in a tacky reenactment. “You have my word, ma’am.”

  Jade gave him a sidelong glance and undid the strings of her apron. She pulled it over her head as she moved to the tall door of the office. “I’m off to teach the children,” she said, adding “sir” in a pointed way. “The satellite people arrived, by the way. I’m sure Thérèse
will be in to inform you of their progress. Just leave the tray by the door when you’re finished, and I’ll take care of it later.”

  As she was pulling the heavy door closed behind her, Becker called her back. “Jade.” He hadn’t said her name before. It sounded foreign and somehow intimate on his lips. He didn’t like the feeling. “It’s a standard renovation process,” he explained as she stood in the doorway with a hand on her hip. “By the time I’m finished with that floor, you won’t be able to tell where the original wood is missing.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him. “We’ll see.”

  AUGUST 1943

  IT WAS KARL who finally shed some light on the goings-on that Kommandant Koch and Nurse Heinz so meticulously oversaw. Elise had run into him during one of her shopping trips to town, and he’d offered to help carry the meager groceries she’d bought to the Horch staff car in which a German driver waited to take her back to the manor.

  As they walked, Elise asked Karl what he knew about what was happening at the manor.

  “They’re SS,” he said, his heavily accented French the product of four years of study in the German school system. “We Wehrmacht don’t know what happens at the manor.”

  “But . . . aren’t you all part of the same army?”

  He smiled tightly. “We fight in the same war, yes, but I don’t think your manor’s Kommandant Koch and our castle’s Generalmajor Müller want any more contact than that. The SS consider themselves—how do you say it? Superior.” It was a difficult word for the young officer to pronounce, and Elise had him repeat it twice before she was satisfied with his accent.

  “There are new residents at the manor,” Elise said as they approached the car that would drive her back up the hill and into the dense woods. “All women—all having babies,” she added, remembering the tall blonde who was due any moment.

  “German?” Karl slowed his pace to stretch the remaining time they had to speak.