Michel passed the stables and brought the horse to the household. He dismounted and tied her off on a thick and gnarled vine. Michel looked at the vine and remembered Percy telling him that it had been planted when he was just a boy, from a time when he followed his father around like an obedient dog, keen to be involved in everything.
Percy liked old things, gnarled things, because it helped one remember and understand that the sweep of time was so much greater than a single generation. He had taught Michel that people were just a moment, when a place like Amer Ami would be there forever. Soon the vine would be older than Percy had been. It would outlast them all.
Michel looked to the house. The door was shut and Maddy was not there to meet him, though he knew she must have heard the echo of hooves on the stone of the road. Rabinaud Valley hid nothing.
He heard the blow of an axe splintering wood from behind the homestead. That had been Percy’s job. He insisted on splitting the logs just so; told Michel and Émile that they did not have the touch, the finesse. Now his daughter was doing his work.
So she knew. He had returned alone, and she surely knew.
Michel walked through the garden until he saw her. She was surrounded by chips of wood. Maddy did not turn and Michel did not go to her. Eventually she dropped the axe. Her shoulders rounded as she grabbed at her own body and bit her fist.
Michel stared at her back in silence. He heard her sobbing. Maddy slowly turned and looked up. Her face was a plea—that it not be true, that he might tell her a lie that let Percy still be alive.
Michel shook his head. He walked forward and Maddy thrust her hand out.
“Don’t,” she said. Maddy brought her hand to her face and rubbed the back of her palm across her eyes. She breathed deep and heavy.
Michel took another step forward. “Maddy—”
“Don’t come near me!”
Michel stopped. “All right. I’ll … wait for you inside. When you are ready to talk. I’m so sorry, Maddy.”
Michel walked away. He went inside and sat alone at a table as he listened to the hollow sound of a dead man’s axe striking wood.
END
AUTHOR MESSAGE
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BOOK 2 PREVIEW
With no memory of the past twenty-four hours, Michel wakes to find himself trapped behind enemy lines. The whole area is set to be blown sky high by the British—dozens of tunnels filled with explosives honeycomb the land.
But Michel is going nowhere.
He can’t talk. Can’t move. Can’t fight …
Axelle, a Belgian woman who takes pity, nurses Michel to health. But she has her own problems.
A German war hero wants her womanly virtue. An unhinged neighbor wants her land. And Axe? All she wants is justice for her dead parents, slaughtered as they slept.
Scores to settle. Wars to fight. There will be blood.
♦
Michel and Axe Bury the Hatchet is now available here. Read on for a preview of the first chapter.
♦
Chapter One
26 APRIL 1917, BELGIUM
Major-General Fitzgerald was affectionately known to the men as Fitz. He was less affectionately known among his junior officers as Cyclone Fitz. His fits of rage were like tropical storms that materialized without warning and blew through in a hurry, leaving an eerie calm and a trail of destruction.
Today, he was just Fitz, and perhaps not even that. His mood was somber. The world war that seemed to focus all its energies on a handful of battlefields at a time weighed heavy on his thick, rounding shoulders.
Fitz looked up and inclined his head, not quite a nod. The corporal, by his side or within hollering distance every waking moment of the war, moved briskly to the tent’s exit to retrieve the soldiers Fitz had summoned—good soldiers, the sort of men who did what had to be done, which was all a soldier really was.
While he waited, Fitz ran his hands along the surface of his wooden desk, unconsciously feeling out scratches and dents. Though it wore the signs of abuse, it was a fine desk, strong and well-built and damned near indestructible. Almost three long years ago Fitz had demanded his men salvage it from the rubble of Cloth Hall in Ypres. That Belgian building had been almost as grand and majestic as Britain’s own Palace of Westminster, until the Germans targeted it with their heavy guns and reduced it to towering mounds of rock and dust.
That is, rock, dust and one blessed desk, standing atop the remnants of a monument to human industry that had stood for six hundred years and no longer existed. It had been as close to a miracle as Fitz had ever seen—a miserable sort of miracle, a useless one that saved no life and delivered no tangible good, but that was for God’s conscience, not his.
The desk had been with Fitz ever since, and he had come to consider it indispensable. It was not just a good luck charm, and not just the receptacle for the maps he spread out as he planned the movements of thousands of men. It was a daily reminder of the promise he made during the First Battle of Ypres in 1914: that he would see the war through, however long it took, whatever sacrifice it demanded. He had no idea then that he would be fighting over the same ground three years later as millions lay dead in mass graves, with no ground gained to show for it.
After moving south, then east, and back again, chasing an advantage, fighting seemingly essential yet ultimately pointless battles across the Lorraine and the Somme and the length of the Western Front, Fitz was again on the outskirts of the city of Ypres. Of course, it was no longer a city in any meaningful sense. It had been emptied of people, and the shelling had obliterated nearly everything that ever stood, turning it back ten thousand years to an age of stone and disorder.
And yet neither side doubted that it was still worth fighting over. If all went to plan, this battle would be the beginning of the end for the Germans in Belgium. Which is what he and the generals had said during the First Battle of Ypres. And the Second.
Third time lucky?
Fitz scoffed at his own stupid joke. There was plenty of misfortune in the war, but never any luck.
But isn’t my desk lucky? No, luck and miracles are different.
Luck was a moment of chance that panned out in one’s favor. Miracles were the occurrence of what should have been impossible. It had been one long war of the impossible, most of it hideous and unforgettable, like that morning’s battle in Gheer when a German forty-inch artillery shell smashed through a brick wall without exploding, only to find its target in a girl hiding under a bed. The impact tore her in half.
Most soldiers would happily never see another miracle, not the sort you got in war. Right then, Fitz knew that a miracle in the coming Third Battle of Ypres was of no use. What he needed was something possible, something the army meteorologists said was downright probable. A single month of good weather.
The whole campaign depended on it—luck, good weather, more or less the same thing. They could probably make do with just shy of three dry weeks. Even three weeks that were merely damp and not torrential might suffice. It was the middle of spring, after all. By the time the offensive was scheduled to begin, it would almost be summer. How much luck could be required for that?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born and raised in the south-west of Western Australia, Avan was brought up surrounded by countless books, animals and c
hainsaws, though which of those had the greatest influence is still up for debate.
As a boy he watched Rumpole of the Bailey and Matlock and dreamed of lawyering. He finagled a law degree, but saw sense and pursued a passion for history with a PhD at the University of Queensland. There, he taught, won several awards and worked as a furniture removalist whose specialty was destroying chipboard furnishings.
He and his wife now live in the north of Spain where Avan has been known to take a long winter dip in the cold Atlantic, after which his words are always slurred, though only sometimes on the page.
Along with The French Bastard series, he is the author of Antipodes: In Search of the Southern Continent, a history from Monash University Publishing, and the forthcoming novel, Sunflowers and Spinifex, from Fremantle Press. Avan continues to write novels and works as an editor.
Table of Contents
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AUTHOR MESSAGE
BOOK 2 PREVIEW
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michel And Henry Go To War (The French Bastard Book 1) Page 21