The Shattered Tree

by Charles Todd

  But Madame’s eyes widened in alarm. A nurse and an officer could only mean bad news.

  I said quickly in my best French that we were visitors seeking information.

  She frowned at that, her dark eyes showing suspicion now, the sort of thing one saw often in out-of-the-way hamlets and villages, where interlopers could mean trouble: tax men, long-lost relatives, someone wanting something from the people and having no scruples about how they got it, traveling merchants with shoddy goods to sell . . . the list went on.

  I spoke to the old dog, but he simply snored on.

  “Why have you come to my house?”

  I reached into my pocket, pulling out the photograph of Philippe Moreau that I’d been given in Rouen.

  “I wondered, Madame, if this is a member of your family? A cousin perhaps? I nursed him when he came to us badly wounded. I would like to know that he recovered and is well.”

  “You’re not a French nurse,” she said, taking the photograph but not looking at it.

  “No, Madame. I am British. But we treat the wounded brought to us, without questioning how they came to be in our sector. This man—his name is Philippe Moreau—was bleeding from a number of wounds when our orderlies found him. And his feet were badly cut up from walking so far. His boots had probably been stolen while he lay unconscious. There’s a possibility that he’d escaped from a column of prisoners and tried to find his way back to Allied lines. He was very courageous.”

  “And what are you to him?”

  “I have already told you. One of his nurses.”

  “And this man?” She thrust her chin toward Captain Barkley.

  “He is my escort today, Madame. It would not be fitting for me to travel about the countryside alone. And it is his motorcar that has brought us here.”

  She looked the Captain up and down. I don’t think he was following her poilu French any more than he had that of the men. I was having more than a little trouble myself. She must have liked what she saw because she set down her knitting, thrusting the needles into the scarf, and turned to look at the photograph.

  She held it close to her eyes, peering at it for a very long moment.

  “I don’t know this man. Philippe Moreau, you say?” She shook her head. “There’s no Philippe in my husband’s family. It isn’t a name they carried down.”

  “Do you recognize him at all?” I persisted. We’d driven nearly forty miles to find this woman. “Perhaps he’s a relative your son discovered in the war and spoke of to you in a letter.”

  She rose, careful of her knitting, and stepped over the dog in her doorway to disappear into the front room of the cottage. I could barely glimpse the furnishings, dark and of an older generation. But there was a photograph on the wall of a man whose face it was hard to see clearly in the dimness. He was wearing the uniform of another time.

  After a moment Madame Moreau returned with a photograph of her own, this one in a small tin frame. “This is my son. See for yourself, there is no likeness.”

  The photograph was of a young man in French uniform standing stiffly by the cottage door, looking straight into the camera. He was shorter than the man in my photograph by a good four or five inches, his hair was very dark, and he had a hook of a nose that dominated his thin face.

  “Sadly, no,” I said, passing the photograph to the Captain.

  “My son is a prisoner. They try to tell me he must be dead, because the Boche have not notified the Army that he is taken. But I know better. I know Pierre. He is not dead. Perhaps he’s hiding in Belgium. They speak French, he could have been mistaken for Belgian.” She took the photograph as Captain Barkley held it out to her, and looked down at the face. “The image of his father,” she said fondly. “He would not desert me.”

  I thought it was sad, her certainty.

  “Have you no other children?” I asked.

  “Two daughters, but they are wed and live elsewhere. Jeanne Marie is in Chartres, and Henriette is in Nancy. She married a man from Alsace.”

  “What is his name?” I asked quickly.

  She told me, and added, “A great lumbering man, he is, and she a head shorter than you. But he’s good to her. And to me. I have no objection to him. Which is more than I can say for that fool married to Jeanne Marie. He went haring off to war, leaving her with three little ones and a mother-in-law no better than she ought to be. She is housekeeper to a priest, you understand, and yet she writes letters to a dozen officers, yes, and sends them little packets of food or books or the latest music. Frivolous. That’s what she is. She should attend to her own grandchildren, helping my daughter care for them. Jeanne Marie would have liked to work in a factory and make more money than her allowance as a sergeant’s wife. But there is no one to help her with the children.” She went on cataloging the sins of Jeanne Marie’s mother-in-law.

  Captain Barkley glanced in my direction, but there was no stemming the tide. The old dog yawned and rolled over. And Madame Moreau finally came to an end of her tally.

  “Tell me about your son,” I said.

  It seemed that she was a widow. Her husband had died of a stomach cancer in the early days of 1910, and an uncle living in Toulon had paid for Madame Moreau’s orphaned son to be educated in the town of Fontainebleau. He had wanted to be a lawyer, an avocat.

  “But the war put a stop to that,” she said with a grimace. “I would have liked for him to become an avocat. He would have made more money than living here, farming.”

  “Is he married? Are there grandchildren?” I asked.

  “Alas, no. There was a girl he’d met in Fontainebleau, but she was too young to marry. So her father said. But I think he believed she could do better than my son.”

  Captain Barkley cleared his throat, letting me know that he was losing patience, now that we’d learned what we could from Pierre Moreau’s mother.

  We thanked her for her time and walked on, reaching the end of the hamlet before turning around. I could see curtains twitching in windows as people watched us, but no one came out to speak to us.

  “Do you believe her?” I asked.

  “Her son looks nothing like the man you treated. I daresay he’s not a relation either.”

  I took a deep breath. “Yes. I think this was a dead end. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken up so much of your time.”

  But I had seen the larger photograph in the cottage, on the far wall. And the man in it hadn’t looked a bit like his son. Of course it might have been Madame’s father. That was possible. I couldn’t see his face well enough to judge if he resembled Philippe Moreau.

  “No harm done,” he said cheerfully as we turned to walk back to the motorcar.

  I was suddenly alert. Had he somehow known all along that this was a wild goose chase? He’d been so agreeable about driving this far—even though he hadn’t seemed very enthusiastic when I’d first suggested such an outing. And he was just as cheerful at the prospect of driving back so late, even though we’d drawn a blank in that hamlet in Fontainebleau Forest.

  How could he have known?

  We reached the motorcar and got in. November’s early darkness was failing, and we were running with our headlamps lit by the time we’d reached the main road to Paris. I could feel rain in the air, a heavy dampness that was beginning to overlay the evening chill. We stopped at a village on the road for our dinner, although it wasn’t much better than the one we’d had in Paris. But there were fresh cabbage and carrots and a dish of boiled onions, and they were very good.

  “From our own garden,” the proprietress told us as we complimented her on the meal.

  It was late when we finally reached Paris, and my side was aching despite the pillows. There were troop encampments outside the city, and the roads had suffered from the lorries and boots, just as they had near Rouen. I could see the lamps lit in the tents, gleaming in the darkness, and somewhere nearby a man was singing to the accompaniment of an accordion. It was a sad song, judging by the music, although I couldn’t hear t
he words.

  The Captain and I had been silent for some time as he concentrated on the state of the roads.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” I said, turning to look at his face in the light from the headlamps.

  “I was thinking of my men,” he said grimly. We were close enough now to hear the guns in the far distance, and in the dark night the reflection in the clouds of exploding shells flickered like summer lightning. “I’d keep them safe until the end of the war, if I could. We’ve lost too many. But of course that’s not possible. I keep praying that my task here will be finished in time to get back to them when they’re sent up the line again.”

  It was a feeling I understood very well. My father’s men had been all-important to him throughout his career in the regiment, and even now my mother visited the widows of those who had been lost over the past four years, offering consolation, advice, and the knowledge that these families were not alone.

  After a time, I said, “Do you think it would be possible to borrow the motorcar for one day more? To drive to Petite-Beauvais?” We were well into the outskirts of the city now.

  “Not possible,” he said.

  I didn’t argue. I’d proved to myself that I could manage, given pillows and a large dose of determination. I could find my own way.

  And it would be better than sitting alone in the Nursery at Belle-Île, listening to the laughter and movement below, a book on my lap and no interest in reading it.

  Sometimes instinct and experience set alarm bells ringing when one really has no idea why. And certainly the more I learned about this man who called himself Philippe Moreau, the more I wondered.

  Why bother at this stage of the war? It would all be over soon, if the rumors were right. Why worry about one man’s odd behavior?

  It was just that with men still dying out there at the Front, I felt a responsibility to them, just as Captain Barkley or my father or Simon Brandon would have done.

  If there was nothing amiss with Philippe Moreau, if he was everything he ought to be, so much the better. I could finish healing and return to the Front with an easy mind. If something was wrong, the sooner someone in authority knew about it the better. All I had done was ask questions.

  But so far there had been no real answers.

  As I climbed the stairs to the Nursery, I bit my lip against the discomfort in my side, and my back was aching from trying to ease the jolting over the miles. I did what I had to do to ready myself for bed and was asleep before I remembered to turn out the light.

  The next morning, I was just finishing my bath, with the help of Sister Fielding, when Madame Ezay came to tell me the handsome Captain was waiting for me in Reception. And I was to bring my coat and those pillows, s’il vous plaît.

  Sister Fielding grinned at me.

  “He’s very attentive, Bess. He positively haunts the door. How many times is it that he’s come to call?”

  “I’d asked a favor of him. It appears he’s granted it.”

  “How could he not?” she asked dryly. “Here, let me button that. You mustn’t twist around to reach it.”

  Captain Barkley and I set out in a companionable silence.

  Petite-Beauvais was north of Paris, perilously close to where the German advance down the Marne River valley had been stopped by the French Army—while the British Expeditionary Force was sent to Mons to protect the coast roads and offer a flanking attack. Even so, some of the villages we passed through had boarded-up shops and cottages where fleeing refugees had thought it best not to return. The devastation of clashing forces had laid to waste much of the countryside farther north. In fact, I was beginning to wonder if we’d find anyone at all at our destination.

  All morning there had been a lull in the artillery barrage we had seen and heard last night. I was grateful for it.

  I didn’t ask why the Captain had changed his mind. I thought it best not to. At least not at the moment. But it had occurred to me in the middle of the night that perhaps my father had asked him to keep an eye on me and see to it that I didn’t find myself in the midst of something I wasn’t well enough to handle.

  It was something the Colonel Sahib might well consider the better part of wisdom. Indeed, I was surprised that I hadn’t found Simon Brandon on the doorstep of the Hôtel de Belle-Île, carrying out my mother’s orders.

  It was exasperating—and comforting—to know that there were people who cared and who tried not to meddle in my life even when they were worried enough to try to shield me from the worst of my tendencies to want to help others.

  The weather hadn’t improved. The feeling that it was about to rain hung over us in the lowering clouds that had obscured the top of the Eiffel Tower as we left Paris and even now rested on church spires and the tops of the taller trees. Drawing a deep breath was difficult, the air was so humid.

  Finally we turned off the main road we’d been following for the past half hour and wound our way down a rutted lane that led us through two other villages before we came to the outskirts of the one we sought.

  The German advance had not reached this far, of course, but the village had that tired look that comes of privation and worry. There were several dozen houses clustered along the road and down the lanes that crossed it. Other lanes led directly into those square muddy farmyards that are so typically French, the outbuilding serving as part of the protecting wall. We explored a little at my request, so that I could get my bearings.

  At the far end of the village was a stone church, square and sturdy, with a short tower. I thought perhaps it had been higher at one time, the rest of it lost in an earlier war. Shops lined the street in the center of the village, and women were busy going about their marketing. They were wearing black, most of them, a rusty black that spoke of long use. The only bit of color was a dark red coat belonging to a little girl of perhaps five or six. She turned to look at the motorcar, her thumb in her mouth, her eyes wide.

  Several of the women paused to look toward the motorcar as well. An English nurse and a Canadian officer appearing out of nowhere must have seemed quite strange, because I didn’t see any smiles. Instead there was apprehension, as if we brought bad news with us.

  In the distance I could hear the guns again, first the ranging shots and then full salvos. Relentlessly pounding the lines on both sides of No Man’s Land. I could picture the aid stations preparing for the first casualties. Shrapnel wounds were always difficult to cope with, tearing flesh with hot metal fragments without regard to uniform or rank.

  “Where should we start?” Captain Barkley asked quietly. “My French is not as good as yours.”

  “Right. The church, then. Or that house standing just by the churchyard. It could be the rectory?”

  We drove back to the church, leaving the motorcar in the road and walking up the footpath toward the house. I could feel a misting drizzle on my face as we reached the door.

  A middle-aged woman opened it almost before the knocker had struck the plate, and I thought perhaps she’d seen us coming, watching our approach from a window.

  “Bonjour,” she said, in the almost singsong manner the French use when coming into a shop or greeting a friend on the street. “How may I help you? Monsieur le Curé is in the church, if you are seeking him.” She considered us, a knowing look that took in the tall man in uniform and the young nursing Sister at his side, calling at the rectory. I smiled at the thought that I was eloping with Captain Barkley, and she returned the smile.

  But just then the door to the church porch opened, squeaking loudly on its rusting hinges, and a man in the long skirted black cassock of a French priest came hurrying toward us. He was wearing the typical flat-crowned, broad-brimmed hat as well, half hiding his face.

  “Alors. He is coming now. Will you step in, please?”

  She led us to a large room dimly lit by a pair of windows. There was heavy dark furniture and darker upholstery. The walls were papered with a striped pattern from another era, and the carpet was nearly as old. Not a pr
osperous rectory today, but then this was a small and very likely poor village, made poorer by war.

  As she moved to light two lamps, I sat down on the hard horsehair seat of one of a pair of rosewood chairs, and Captain Barkley stood just behind me, waiting for the priest.

  The woman—the Curé’s housekeeper, surely—stood waiting too as we heard his footsteps outside and then moving swiftly across the uncarpeted floor of the entry.

  He greeted us formally, politely, but there was an expression of worry in his face that told me he too expected bad news. He was an older man, his black hair heavily streaked with gray and his dark eyes still black lashed, giving him an oddly youthful face despite its lines. I thought perhaps he was nearer forty than fifty, but that the war had aged him.

  “We are so sorry to take you from your duties,” I began in French with a smile after the introductions were over. “We are here looking for a former patient, to see how he is recovering.”

  The Curé and his housekeeper exchanged glances.

  “There is no recently wounded man here. But I know there are three from Petite-Beauvais in clinics. Paris, Lyon, and I believe in Nantes,” the priest said after a moment. “Perhaps you have the wrong village?”

  “Ah,” I said, recovering quickly. “Perhaps he hasn’t yet come back to Petite-Beauvais. We are too soon. Lieutenant Moreau is his name.” I purposely didn’t use his given name.

  Judging from their response, I might just as well have asked if the Devil lived in the village. I tried not to appear surprised. Behind me, Captain Barkley started to speak, then, thinking better of it, cleared his throat.

  “Before the war, the Moreau family lived in the house just beyond the church,” Monsieur le Curé told me after a moment. “But there is no one living there at present.”

  I hadn’t seen a house, only a stand of parkland woods.

  “Oh. I am sorry,” I said, in a such-a-long-journey-for-nothing tone of voice. “Is his family in Paris?”