by David Mellon
Because of him, the riddles became a regular topic of conversation in the infirmary. At first, most of the men didn’t know what they represented, something about this Second Lieutenant Goux’s brothers having been kidnapped. Perhaps his sister Adi as well. Didn’t matter to them; it passed the time.
At the beginning, the men thought Goux to be a bit of an odd duck, with his not speaking and his peach fuzz cheeks. But there was something about his shy manner and good nature that inclined most of them to look after the lad. Woe be it to you if Doc caught you being mean to the kid. The colonel who muttered about “not having some bloody brown wog bandage me” found himself face-first out in the mud.
His loss. At this point Adi, as anyone who paid attention to these things agreed, had marvelous hands.
It had not started out that way.
Often as not in those first months, when the wounded started pouring in, Adi would have to run from the room, to let her stomach stop turning. Or go and be sick somewhere.
Doc would curse and shout after her, “Goux! Get your ass back in here! It’s just a goddamned leg wound!”
She did her best. Dragged herself back in.
Until one day, she realized—staring into the chest cavity of a young British soldier, his heart still pumping—that it wasn’t the human body that made her sick, but the violence done to it.
Once she understood this, her attitude shifted. When she saw some part she’d not seen before—a lung, or a kidney, or the valves of the heart—she began to appreciate the opportunity she had stumbled into. She was receiving training that only a handful of women could claim.
There were women in the war, she knew: cooks, nurses, prostitutes—she’d even seen some ladies driving ambulances. And of course women like Edith Cavell, the gallant British nurse, shot by the Germans. But as far as she knew she was the only woman in an infirmary, actually doing surgery at the front. It made her smile to imagine what her mother would say if she could see. Well, the doctor part, at least. God only knows what she would make of Second Lieutenant Goux.
For months Adi had been certain she’d be found out. It was inconceivable that she could keep fooling all these men. They were men! Didn’t they know what men look like?!
It didn’t hurt that everyone was covered in mud most of the time, bone-tired, staring at their boots. But, as the days turned to months, she began to understand—people saw what they expected to see. They could not imagine a woman dressed as a soldier, holding a scalpel, covered in blood. So they didn’t see her.
Of course, it would never have worked if they had heard her voice. That would have been the end of it right there. Thinking back to lunch with George’s family and their discussion about all those women in disguise who fought in the American Civil War—she hadn’t thought it possible. They must have had low voices.
Once, on leave, in a little town south of Troyes, they had eaten an unforgettable dinner in a restaurant run by one of Doc’s old schoolmates. The man and his wife had made a big fuss over Doc and his friends, putting them at the best table in the room, though they were certainly the only diners in the place who were not of high rank.
Adi saw a different side of Doc. He was a Frenchman after all, food his lifeblood. She finally got to experience what real French food was like: smoked ox tongue, partridge, and snails, wonderful wines, strange pâtés, and cheeses. For several hours, the war was pushed aside and Doc, with the assistance of a couple of bottles of extraordinary wine, turned into . . . himself, she guessed.
She did have a real fright, however, when she caught the owner’s wife staring at her through the meal in a curious manner. At the end of the evening, the woman leaned in to Adi and whispered, “Bravo, mademoiselle.”
Adi almost had a heart attack, but no one else appeared to notice.
• • •
One rainy afternoon, when neither side had the will to make the mud worse by shooting at each other, they were sitting around in the infirmary playing poker and talking. At the table with Adi and Doc and Gershom was a man from Besançon with an ungainly bandage wrapped across his nose. A couple of days before, a sniper’s bullet had blown the spectacles off his face, taking a small piece of the bridge of his nose with them. Having lost his glasses, he’d been holding his cards at arms length to read them. The infirmary always had a collection of eyeglasses, left by soldiers who no longer required them. Between hands, Adi sorted through them for the man to try on. They finally found a pair that would do. “Bless you,” said the soldier. “I was like Jeremiah without his spectacles!”
Doc dealt the next hand and looked to Adi to start, but she was sitting there staring into space.
“What is it?” he asked.
Turning to the man, she pointed to her mouth and made a backwards motion with her finger.
Familiar with her gestures, Gershom asked the man to repeat what he’d said about his friend who lost his spectacles.
“My friend?” said the man, confused. “Oh. Not my friend, I was talking about the prophet Jeremiah.”
Adi pulled the watch out of her tunic and opened it up to the third riddle. She slid it across the table to Gershom, signing for him to read.
“Like, I don’t know it by heart,” said Gershom.
“How will you find . . .” he recited. “. . . now that−Jeremiah’s quite blind,
“A cool drink of water for the wanderers’ father,
“After forty years of thirst has left him quite cursed
“and unable to step cross the border.”
The man looked around the table in bewilderment at the sudden, breathless attention he was recieving.
“I think you’d better tell us, soldier,” said Doc, “what you meant by the comment about Jeremaiah?”
Turned out, there was a huge sculpture, a bunch of biblical figures around a hexagonal column, in a monastery down south: Moses, David, Daniel, Zachariah, Isaiah . . . and Jeremiah.
Originally a fountain in the monastery’s courtyard, it came to be called the Well of Moses.
Adi tapped her knucles on the table and gestured to her eyes.
“Yeah,” said Cloutain, one of the nurses. “What’s that got to do with him being blind?”
The soldier from Besançon continued.
The marble figures composing the Well of Moses were quite realistic, with impressive detail. King David had ivory strings on his harp. Mary wore a metal crown. And Jeremiah had little copper glasses perched upon his nose.
During the French Revolution, when the citizens of France were taking out their frustrations on the church, the monastery was destroyed and the sculpture was knocked about. Someone made off with the clever little spectacles. Never to be seen again.
Therefore, rendering “Jeremiah quite blind.”
Adi banged on the table again to get the man’s attention and tried to sign. Doc helped her out.
“Where?” he barked. “Where is this fountain?”
Utterly confused, the man stammered, “It’s—it’s in the—city of Dijon.”
The infirmary erupted into shouts of “The map! Get the map!”
Doc was ahead of them. Out from the inside breast pocket of his coat, came a folded map.
On his birthday the year before, Doc, who complained endlessly about “never knowing where the hell they were,” was presented with a map of France by Gershom. No ordinary map this, but the sort available only to generals and high-ranking officials. They knew better than to ask where he’d managed to find such a thing. When not in use, it was always tucked safely in Doc’s pocket.
He spread it open on the tabletop and they all gathered around, Adi in the middle.
Standing out amidst the myriad dotted lines, circles, and scribbles indicating their travels was a thick black ruled line extending from the city of Ypres in Belgium, down to the town of Belfort, near the border of Switzerland. On more than one occasion they had noted the coincidence between this line and the nearly unchanging demarcation of the Western Front.
&n
bsp; The man from Besançon stuck his head into the circle and put his finger down upon Dijon. “This means what?” he asked.
One of the interns did his best to explain, making a rather fanciful mishmash of the details. Adi let it be, as did Doc. It was just as well that the men were not too clear on the particulars.
The excitement diminished, however, once the realization hit home that without the fourth city they weren’t much better off than they’d been before.
A soldier came in with a mangled hand—caught in the feeder on his machine gun.
Doc folded up the map and bopped Adi on the head with it. “We got three, Goux. We’ll get the last.”
Everyone got back to the card game, but Adi’s heart wasn’t in it anymore.
• • •
Adi looked over at Doc. He was studying her and the watch sitting before her on the table. Rubbing his thumb across the silver medallion around his neck, he shook his head and went back to gazing out at the landscape.
Adi looked at the little swallow flying, as always, across the back of the watch. Time flying.
But not for much longer.
In a week, it would all be done. Whatever it was. This game she was supposed to be playing. It was a miracle she was still alive. Were any of them? The boys? George and Thomas? Coal? It had been so long.
“I can’t remember,” said Doc, “the last time we came here to the river. Don’t know why we stopped. Always figured Lisette and I would bring the girls . . .”
Doc drummed his fingers on the table, dropped his chair down, and stood up.
He sniffed and rubbed at the end of his nose.
“Just as well,” he said, looking over at Adi. “It’s going to be a long long time before anyone has a picnic in this place again.”
If Adi had been able, she would have kept him talking. Maybe she’d find out why he wore his wife’s medallion around his neck. Find out what happened to Lisette and his daughters.
But maybe it was just as well. They all had their secrets, didn’t they?
Doc slapped Adi on the shoulder. “Come on, my talkative friend. We got work to do if we’re going to head up to Mézières with the Americans tomorrow. Let’s go see if anyone has managed to scrape together something like breakfast in this godforsaken place!”
The Watch’s Tale
Tapping his fingernail against the top of the jar, Coal watched over the body. It was taking so long he began to think he’d misjudged the man. It had happened. Not often.
But at last, the creature climbed up out of the man’s throat. A fat thing with terrible long legs. It tried to dart away. Coal caught hold of it.
Then he saw the girl.
Eleven or twelve, maybe. Pale with a scarlet slash of lips and eyes too large for her face. He kept an eye on her as she stared unblinking from the end of the hallway. He was going to bolt and put the bug in its jar later, but the girl’s expression of calm fascination kept him there until he was done.
A decade later, in a theater in London, Coal looked up in the middle of the third act of Hamlet to see the girl staring at him from her box. She had grown into her features and was alarmingly beautiful.
She found him during the interval, standing alone in a shadowed alcove. With her lady’s companion waiting at a discreet distance, the young woman approached. She bowed her head, her hands to her breast and declared, “The day you took my uncle, monsieur, was the day my life began.”
He insisted he’d had nothing to do with the man’s death. But he saw in her eyes that there wasn’t a thing he could say that was going to dissuade her from her interpretation.
Her uncle had left her with a fortune, some compensation for what he had taken from her in her youth. With it, she purchased a crumbling fortress and a substantial piece of property south of the city of Nancy and built a great estate. No small feat for a young woman in that time. She offered the house to Coal, then and there. He declined.
Not to be deterred, she told him she would have another house built for him in the forest nearby.
“Do I look as if I am in need of a home?” he asked.
With the tips of her fingers, she brushed the hair from her forehead. “I would never presume to know, monsieur. Only, if some day you desired to lay your head upon a pillow . . .”
• • •
After years abroad, Coal returned to France. Curious about the young woman, he searched for and found her estate near Nancy.
At the southern end of an orchard of chestnut trees she’d had planted, there was a smaller house. Not too close, but not too far. Peering through the windows, he saw no sign that anyone other than a maid frequented the place. There were fresh roses by the bed. He concluded that someone had been replenishing them for years.
Returning to the estate, he sat in the branches of the tree outside her study and observed the young woman working at her desk. Reading to herself what she had written, she stroked her cheek with her quill feather.
He watched her for hours, until, famished, he knocked on her door.
He had had no more plan than that he might find a meal or stay the night. But before he knew it, a year had passed. And then a second. He took to calling her Viviane, after the witch in the King Arthur legend who enchants Merlin into an endless sleep.
After too many quarrels over his untidiness, he left the estate, but made it only as far as the smaller house. There, she let him be, mostly. He would return from his wanderings to find a painting propped up on the kitchen table or a grand piano in the parlor. And again, for a time, he would be beguiled into staying.
Living in the great house with a pair of servants, she spent her days writing poetry and some indecipherable epic, about a war between the earth and fallen angels living on the dark side of the moon. For several seasons she was enthralled with Indian mysticism, filling her rooms with pictures of Ramakrishna and Sarada Devi and engaging in practices of silence and meditation.
• • •
He tried to stay. But his hunger for solitude finally outweighed his desire to see her eyes, to watch her brush the hair from her forehead the way she did. Over time, Coal learned about her years in the clinic and the fires, and why she had been living alone with her uncle. She was mad, he knew. And, over time, she became more so.
So, out into the world he went, to meddle again in the affairs of men.
• • •
It seemed no time at all.
He found her on a bed of straw, in the room where her sumptuous four-poster used to sail like a great ship. She had, at some point, given the estate over to the Poor Clares or the Carmelites, and appeared to have taken vows herself. But the house was empty now. Why they had left or why she had not gone with them, he’d never know. Old and still beautiful, even in death, she lay in the corner, her wrists cut open, haloed by pools of dried blood.
Back in the little house, perched on the keys of the grand piano, he found a small package wrapped in butcher paper and twine, addressed simply: M. Coal. Inside, scratched on a slip of paper, were a few lines from Hamlet’s soliloquy. And there was a pocket watch.
On the inside was a portrait of the two of them. Nested behind that was a poem; a rhyme about hearts sealed forever in a jar. And on the back of the watch was engraved a swallow circled by the words tempus fugit.
Rubbing his thumb back and forth across the lid, Coal watched, as far off through the forest of chestnuts, the grand chateau lit the twilight as it burned.
Chapter 29
“You’ve got to be kidding!” said George. “Aunt Elodie—locked up?”
Uncle Henri looked at them from under his fearsome eyebrows and shook his bare head. He didn’t look as if he were joking.
• • •
As soon as George, Thomas, and Augustin had given their report to General Maistre and received the reply, Uncle Henri pulled them outside the command post. Their delight at seeing him was short-lived.
“Nice to see you, too, boys. Now be quiet and listen.”
It was on
e shock after another, Aunt Elodie’s detention being but one. There’d been arrests and imprisonment, judges removed, property confiscated.
Henri conceded that much of the news out of Alorainn was rumor, at best second- or third-hand. But the talk was all the same: a perpetual state of martial law. The royal guard transformed into the duchess’s private army. There’d even been whispering about hangings.
Now the lads understood why news from home had grown so infrequent and short on specifics. It wasn’t simply the war and lost letters.
The one constant in all the accounts was Duchess Johanna. No longer encumbered by the stronger members of the family, she had remade Alorainn in her image.
“It was admirable,” said Henri, “that we all went off to do our duty, but we were fools to leave Alorainn in the hands of this madwoman. I’m as much to blame as anyone, ignoring warnings, postponing visits.”
“We haven’t been back in . . .” George looked at the others. “Well, I haven’t been back at all. Not once. Thomas was there briefly, but not in—”
“Almost sixteen months,” Thomas said.
“I told you you couldn’t trust that daft woman,” said Augustin.
“Not what you were saying this morning,” said George.
“Well—I never said she wasn’t attractive.”
“Oh, for God’s sakes,” said Henri.
“I’m just saying”—Augustin tugged at his bandage—“she was broken to start with, but after Halick disappeared, she’s gone over the moon.”
“Augustin!” said Uncle Henri, noticing the young man’s arm. “You’re wounded.”
“We’re on our way to the infirmary,” said George.
“It’s nothing,” said Augustin. “Just need to change this dressing. I can do it myself.”
“He’s afraid of the flu,” said Thomas.
“He should be,” said Uncle Henri. “We’ve been lucky here so far, but the thing is spreading like wildfire.”
“See, I told you,” said Augustin.
They passed through a makeshift mess area, tables set up outdoors to take advantage of the sun. Soldiers, medical staff, and wounded, eyes glazed in fatigue, were beginning to straggle in. Augustin looked down at the trays and shook his head in disgust.