by David Mellon
“All right,” he said. “So, who are you then?” The doctor leaned forward, putting his hand into Adi’s coat. She lurched back.
“Whoa, kid. Just looking for—”
He reached very deliberately into her left tunic pocket.
“—this.”
He held up a little booklet: Paybook was stamped on the cover. He flipped it open and squinted at it by the light from one of the small windows.
“Jean Joseph Goux, of the . . . hmm, 85th Infantry.” A hard look passed across the doctor’s eyes.
Damn. She should have checked those pockets. Well, it was out there now.
She finished wrapping the bandage and neatly tucked the ends away. She took the scraps of gauze, poured some water from a canteen, and began cleaning cuts on the soldier’s face and neck.
• • •
They worked without talking, holding everything down in the narrow space as best they could, while Gershom, cursing and grumbling, wrestled the motorcar along a road that was most likely not smooth even before it was shot to hell by artillery. Finally, Adi folded up a couple of empty sacks and made a pillow for a man who was clearly not going to see the next day. He would likely not be the only one.
“Bad night, last night,” said the doctor. “I’d hoped the snow would settle things down. Just goes to show you, I don’t know much.”
He took a filthy-looking handkerchief from his pocket and swabbed his craggy face. “I know you boys took it hard. I’m happy to see any of you.”
“We’re getting close, Doc!” Gershom shouted from up front. “Where do you want to go?”
Sure enough, Adi could see signs of life through the slats covering the windows. Cavalry and a group of soldiers and horses pulling cannons.
Doc rubbed his tired eyes with hands that looked more like a farmer’s than a surgeon’s. He yelled back over the sound of the engine.
“Where do I want to go? I want to go to Florida, America! And sit on one of those beaches in the sun and drink until I don’t remember. Why the hell would I know where we’re going?! I assume someone is finding us another burned-out house or a barn! Or digging a hole in the earth and calling it an infirmary. Just—take us there, Gershom.”
His aggravation bled away, until his face settled back into looking like a worn-out mattress. He sighed and looked over at the young, smooth-faced soldier sitting before him.
“What are you doing in the infantry, Goux?”
Adi shrugged and tried to keep busy with tidying up a bandage.
“Damned waste, is what it is,” he said, studying her. “Paybook says you’re from Normandy. You don’t look like anybody I’ve ever met from Normandy.”
Adi was afraid to look over at him, afraid he was going to notice other things, like her skin being too smooth or her fingers too delicate. In all the excitement she hadn’t had time to worry about whether her disguise was fooling anyone. And now she found out she was supposed to be from Normandy.
“Middle Eastern?” said the doctor. “Indian, maybe? I spent a couple years in West Bengal, few years back.” Doc tilted his head studying her, as if she were some puzzle that he couldn’t decipher. “I guess there’s no reason the French army can’t have Indian soldiers,” he said, scratching his crooked nose. “God knows the Brits brought a few over.”
The soldier on the bottom bunk groaned. Doc put the palm of his hand on the man’s forehead, checking his temperature.
“I imagine,” he said glancing up at Adi, “you want to get back to . . . what’s left of the 85th?”
That was exactly what Adi did not want. She was trying to figure out some way to sidestep the question, when—with screeching brakes—they came to an abrupt halt. Adi held on to a couple of the men to keep them on their bunks.
Straight away, the canvas flap lifted and the gate cracked down. There stood Gershom, black smudges for eyes, a mustache like a coal brush, barking orders to several men with stretchers, ready to unload the wounded.
Adi grabbed her pack and wrestled it and herself out of the back of the ambulance. Doc climbed out as well. He looked nearly as unsteady as his patients, leaning against the side of the car for a moment till he got his balance. But immediately, questions commenced regarding the condition of the injured and their designation.
A cocky-looking young colonel started in on Doc about where he’d been and why he’d been gone so long and why he thought it was acceptable to take a vehicle against orders.
Cursing under his breath, Doc pushed past the officer and followed the stretchers down into what looked to be the new infirmary, the root cellar of a nearly flattened barn. Adi was left holding her pack in her arms, around her a beehive of activity. But no one took any notice of a lone soldier from some battalion down the line.
Now what to do? She dropped her pack to the ground and sat down on top of it.
What, if anything, had she solved with this charade? Other than keeping herself from freezing to death and getting murdered. There was that. But what now? Where to go? She had no idea where she was, except in the middle of a war.
A map was what she needed. How far was she from Alorainn? And Coal. She shuddered at the memory.
She dug through the small haversack at her waist and broke off a piece of muddy-gray chocolate from a half-eaten bar. It tasted about as good as it looked, but it was something. Around her, soldiers rushed to and fro: French, British, and Belgium, even Afrikaners and Indians. There were a pair of Scotsman in kilts. They were digging holes in the earth—long zig-zagging trenches, an almost impossible task in this cold ground. Why were they doing that?
Xander and Xavier would know what this all meant. She stifled a moan at the thought.
They’ve been out there, somewhere, for a year and a half or more! They must have thought she’d given up on them. George, too. And Thomas and Uncle Henri and all those lovely people.
She touched her fingers to her lips. Damn it. George would have come back from Paris and found her gone. Without a word. And now—well, what difference did it make. They would surely have forgotten about her by now.
She loosed the strap on her helmet and let it fall into her lap, a relief to get the thing off. She rubbed her hands across her head, and bits of freshly cut hair fell into Jean Joseph Goux’s helmet.
She looked down and saw scratched under the brim, a small heart with an “JJ” and a “P” etched inside. Jean Joseph and . . . Paulette. The name he’d whispered as he died.
This made her feel about as miserable as she figured she could manage.
Poor Paulette. She’ll never know what happened to him. Like George. I’ll get myself killed out here and he’ll never know. I’ll just be that strange, cheeky girl that he kissed in the garden. She blew little pieces of hair out of her helmet.
She couldn’t talk to anyone. She didn’t know anyone. She had five or six francs in her pocket. She didn’t know what two of the riddles meant; why “Jeremiah was quite blind” or what the “blood in the bread” might mean! She’d cut off her hair. She wasn’t even herself anymore.
Dropping her head into her hands, she felt tears sting her eyes. Stop it! No sitting here crying like a girl. You’re not a girl any more.
Someone cleared their throat behind her. Adi looked back over her shoulder.
The doctor was sitting on a pile of sandbags taking a bite from an apple. He had another in his hand. He tossed it over to Adi. She polished it up on her coat-sleeve and took a bite. It was bruised and a long way from the tree. It tasted like a small miracle, nonetheless.
The sun cut through the clouds for a moment as they ate their apples. The old man sat with his mud-caked boots crossed, eating everything but the stem. He played with a little silver medallion on a chain around his neck as he considered the soldier before him.
Chapter 24
Just as Adi had feared, George returned home to La Maison Chinoise to find her gone.
No note, nothing said to Thomas. Augustin was concerned for a moment that the young woman
was a figment of his friend’s imagination. Maybe an elaborate prank.
However, when it was discovered that Halick was missing as well, and Detective Lendt—taken all together, this formed a sinister picture that was hard to ignore.
George was devastated.
He tried taking it out on Thomas, though Thomas was beating himself up enough for the both of them. When it became clear that he wasn’t to blame for Adi’s vanishing act, they were left with nothing but speculation. It took half the afternoon to catch Augustin up on the rest of the story: kidnappers, brothers, watches, and riddles. But in the end, they had to admit that they didn’t know much more than Belfort, and that they used to throw cats off towers in Ypres.
Thomas found another detective to replace the missing Lendt, but the man’s efforts, though diligent, were ultimately fruitless. The days turned to weeks with no clues.
Then it was August 1914.
And as Uncle Henri had predicted: like dominos falling, everyone declared war. No one wanted to be caught on the defensive. Everyone mobilized. And so it began.
By the end of September, Augustin was called up to join his cavalry regiment, which made George feel even more worthless. Despite Thomas’s best efforts, George started drinking again. Thomas grew accustomed to collecting his friend from the police at odd hours. Or equally alarming, dragging him away from enlistment centers, where he attempted on several occasions to join up.
It was a wet miserable autumn in Alorainn, as it was all across Europe in 1914, but few complained. However inconvenienced they might have been, the thought of hundreds of thousands of their fathers and sons, brothers and husbands, marching along muddy roads or living in rain-filled trenches, put their trifling discomfort in perspective.
• • •
The duchess, rather than becoming debilitated by the uncertainty of her only child’s fate, instead grew more engaged, first with the running of the household and then with the business of state. Through it all, she maintained that Halick would be returning any day.
To no one’s surprise but her own, after years of disinterest as the duke’s wife, the duchess realized she had a ferocious appetite for power. Every day she took on more of the duties she had been grooming Halick to assume—after what she envisaged would be George’s inevitable disintegration.
As is so often the case in times of great uncertainty, people are more than willing to give up authority to someone who can assure their safety. With the ever-closer war as an excuse, the duchess turned an open household into something resembling an armed camp.
Some members of the family said they didn’t care what the woman did as long as she kept the war on the other side of the wall. Aunt Elodie, on the other hand, wondered if she was the only one to notice that the formerly colorful, largely ceremonial, palace guard had been replaced by a group of dark and dangerous-looking thugs.
• • •
For a time at least, far enough away from the invading armies and front lines, life in much of Europe carried on, as if a war was something that one could be excited about but still ignore, like typhoons in the China Sea.
Bakers still rose before dawn to make bread and children continued to neglect their lessons. In Paris, as in Berlin, women in violaceous gowns and men in hats (quite as tall as last year) attended the opera. People carried on affairs in Saint Petersburg and embezzled from their business partners in London, just as they had before.
Most everyone strived, for as long as they could, to deny the fact, becoming clearer as the months flew past, that this war, the first one they’d seen in a generation, spreading from Europe and Russia to the Middle East, to Africa and India, China and Japan, was not going to be over by Christmas.
Alorainn had no standing army. This didn’t keep a good portion of the household from joining up with the French. Cousin Klaus, having people in Bamberg and generally being contrary, wanted to fight for Germany, but was dissuaded. George’s uncles Robert, Sébastien, and Henri went off to serve in the French army as officers. This only exacerbated George’s feelings of frustration. He stayed drunk for the better part of a year—living up to all of the duchess’s hopes for him, driving Thomas near to distraction.
This went on until one morning when George found himself waking up in another cow pasture. Lying there, staring up at the clouds, he came to the conclusion that he’d been going about this all wrong. Taking the weekend to shake off the worst of his hangover, he quietly put his affairs in order. Monday morning, bright and early, he got Samuel to give him a ride on his motorcycle to the train station in Saint Clouet—without a goodbye to anyone. Not even Thomas.
In the city of Lyon, a couple of hours south, a barber cut George’s beautiful ash brown curls down to stubble, and he traded in his fine suit for a well-used one and a sensible pair of shoes. That afternoon, he managed, finally, to find someone unobservant enough to sign him up. It was a year to the day since Adi had disappeared.
Chapter 25
The abbot lifted the box from the brown paper and twine it was wrapped in. A simple cardboard thing, half the length of his hand, banged up on the corners, like a box one might keep recipes in. There was a little metal slot on the front, with a label, reading, H-K. Someone had drawn a line in ink through the letters.
Abbot Berno had to sit down. No matter how many times he opened these boxes, it never failed to make him light-headed. This was the fifth. And in weight, at least, identical to its predecessors. He lifted off the top and removed the layer of cotton batting.
The contents were the same: a dozen gold coins, Spanish, dated 1786, bound together with a pair of red rubber bands. Four cut diamonds, of a carat or two. And, lastly, a pair of emeralds the size of June beetles.
Abbot Berno shook his head in wonder and swabbed his brow with the sleeve of his robe. He coiled the twine and neatly folded the paper.
As always, it was addressed, in a somewhat childish hand, to Xander & Xavier Dahl c/o Abbot Berno, Gentiana Monastery.
• • •
“That’s because you’re an idiot,” said Xander.
“Why does that make me an idiot?” replied Xavier.
“Well, it’s not just that that makes you an idiot,” he said. “Hand me that drill, the little one.”
The boys were high up in the scaffolding on either side of Brother Christopher, helping him repair the old library shelves.
Since their disappearance, the boys had grown half a foot, though it hardly seemed they’d added a pound; side by side, they were like a couple of match sticks.
Xavier put aside a worn copy of Le Morte d’Arthur and handed over the tool.
“I’m just saying, if it was a few hundred years earlier—we’d be fighting. Wouldn’t matter that we were twelve.”
“I’m pretty sure we’re the same age,” said Xander. “And I’m only eleven.”
“Quit interrupting. Remember the Children’s Crusade in the thirteenth century. All those kids went to fight in the Holy Land.”
“No they didn’t,” said Xander. “Half of them died crossing the Alps, and the other half was sold into slavery when they got to Genoa and the sea didn’t part for them.”
“Quiet please!” said a voice from below. There were still a few of the brothers and a professor or two, working at the desks despite the construction.
“Is that true?” whispered Xavier.
“Yes,” said Xander. “And the father of the German boy, who heard voices and started the whole thing, was hanged by the families of the other children who had followed him. You never pay attention in History.”
Brother Christopher blew curlicues of wood shavings off his new shelf.
“Thank you, Xander. There’s little enough to be said for the age we live in, but at least we don’t let children fight in wars anymore. Least not here.”
“Yeah, but bookshelves?” said Xavier. “There’s got to be something more important than this we could be doing.”
“I’m sure Brother Tobias would love to have you hel
p lay pipe for the new latrines,” said Brother Christopher. “These buildings have been perched on the side of this mountain for ages, through more wars than anyone can even remember. The only reason they’re still standing is because somebody goes to the trouble to fix the shelves once in awhile.”
“I seriously doubt that anyone has ever mended this shelf,” said Xavier. “A wonder the whole thing hasn’t come crashing down.”
A voice from below called out, “Boys. A word, please.”
They looked down. The abbot and his assistant were crossing the room through the desks.
Brother Christopher took back the drill.
“All right, boys, try not to—”
But they were already scrambling down the scaffolds like monkeys. They dropped from a considerable height right in front of the abbot, whose birdlike assistant Brother Hilbert burped out a little shriek.
“Will you quit that!” said the abbot. “You’re going to break your necks one of these days.”
“Sorry, Father Abbot,” said Xander.
“Sorry, Father.” Xavier kissed his ring.
“I thought you might like to know,” said the abbot, studying the boys, “that you’ve received another package.”
“Another one,” said Xavier. He looked at his brother.
• • •
Nearly two years earlier, the boys had awakened in a state of great confusion, to find themselves in a strange bed, in a tiny dark cell. They couldn’t remember the night before, except pieces of a nightmare they both seemed to have had.
Abbot Berno had been the one to come in and throw open the shutters on the window, letting in the morning light.
He calmed the boys and explained that as far as he had been told, there was a fire in their home. They had been saved by a stranger passing in the night. Though the man tried, he was unable to save the young woman in the back bedroom.