by Amanda Dykes
“You have a secret strength, Mireilles,” Papa said.
“I do?” I paused my spinning and laid in the tall grass, cupping my chin in my hands. It sounded like something from the fairy books. I was eight, and he was perfect. A fount of secret treasures he handed out to me in lessons, one by one.
“Many of them, yes. But one is that you know another language now. And I will tell you something else: It is even more powerful if you keep that a secret from others. Words run faster than the waters of the Meuse when people think that they are not understood. You can learn much that way.” I pictured the surging river he spoke of, the splendor of such a thing. Rivers brought life in this green land. Could words do the same?
He tapped my head lightly, playfully. “If you do not float away.” And with a wink, the conversation had been over.
And now that language stared at me from the end of Papa’s old gun barrel, with eyes wider than this war.
“Please,” the man said. “I mean you no harm.” His voice was low and steady.
He raised his hands, palms in the air. They were blistered, caked with sap and soil, as if he had been tangling with my woods. I did not like that. I pulled the gun tighter into my shoulder. I might not have a uniform like theirs, but I could fire a rifle just as quickly as they, if I needed to. I was wrong to have lit Papa’s lantern that night. But I had been desperate, so desperate, for him to come.
Instead, I’d summoned soldiers.
And now perhaps Grand-père would not be the only one to be buried tonight. It could be me. Or it could be these men. A cricket sang nearby, and I wished I were as ignorant as it of what this all meant.
“By George,” the man behind him a few paces said. He was slack-jawed and made little sense to me. His uniform was like the others, but his accent was not. “It’s the angel.”
I looked at my boots beside the tree, all caked in mud. I looked at my skirts, torn and snagged. I knew my hair must be wilder than this wilderness, and I had smeared my own face with dirt to blend in with the night, hours before, only to muddy the mask of it with tears as I buried my only friend and relative. I wondered in what sort of cathedral this man worshipped, if his angels looked like earthen creatures of doom.
The third one—the one with spectacles—looked like he belonged in a library, the way he studied me. As if I were a painting or a puzzle. His gaze caught on my apron for an instant, and then his quiet eyes narrowed. “No,” he said. “I don’t think that’s who she is.”
I stared blankly at the fabric that had caught his study. Was it only a few years before that I was imagining it to be part of ball gowns? As if this world could ever have known rooms filled with light and music and slippered feet dancing and hearts weaving together. Fairy tales, all. Every one of them false.
And then there was the first man. He lowered his hands slowly, never taking those wide eyes from mine. I could not see much of him, where he stood shadowed by Grand-père’s tree. His stance, though, seemed somehow . . . good. I do not know how to explain it but to say that it seemed steady and kind.
I wanted to trust his words. “I mean you no harm.”
And yet I also knew Papa’s words to be true. “Be wary of strangers, Mireilles.” I knew it to my very bones. I would never forget.
I held out a hand, halting them. The one gawked, the one studied, and the one in the shadow, he stepped forward ever so slowly.
“Please,” he said again. Someone had taken care to teach him manners. “We can help.” He looked so sure of this that I wanted to dive into those words and find in them light and breath for my lungs and truth. All the things that seemed far gone from the world.
But then a flicker of doubt, so quick, shadowed his face. I could see his features now, in a slip of fading moonlight. Eyes of gentle blue, face kind. Ordinary, but handsome. And—tired. He looked so very tired. It was this that made me want to trust him the most, for such a one would understand this place inside of me that was too poured out, too empty for words.
“Right?” He looked over his shoulder at his friends. “We mean to help.” He turned back to me and looked lost for a moment, staring at his hands as if they might somehow learn a way to translate between him and me. He nudged two open palms up in the air to show he lifted something invisible.
But my burden was so great, there was none who could help. I thought of Grand-père in the ground, of how cold and wet that dirt was, and I wanted to crumple into sobbing. But that was not who I was. My lip trembled and I bit it. My knees shook and I locked them, scolded them—that is not who you are. No matter that it had been weeks since I’d seen real food. Their plight was much the same, I knew.
The quiet one with the spectacles pulled something from his satchel. It was dark and round and fit in his palm. “Matthew,” he said, and the one with the tired and kind eyes looked back. In a silent exchange that told us all it was meant for me, the one called Matthew took it, and held it out.
It was a potato.
I wanted to weep.
My fingers lifted from the trigger, preparing to reach. The one confused about angels licked his lips and reached out too. Toward the potato, I knew. Not toward me. Still, my instincts did not believe that, and I pulled the gun tighter, took a step back.
Matthew witnessed all of this and backhanded his comrade’s reaching arm, causing it to fly and the reaching one to shake out his hand fiercely, as if he’d just been dealt a horrific blow . . . which he had not. He drew back. His pride, I suspect, wounded most of all, as he shot daggers at Matthew.
But Matthew did not see that. He was looking at me, steady and strong. He nodded, as if commending me. He held out his arm as far as it would stretch, putting more distance between us, and waited.
My fingers betrayed me. They left the rifle for the potato and I wondered dizzily if I was like Jacob in Grand-père’s scriptures, if I had just given all for a mere bowl of stew.
I could smell it. It was earthy, full of promise. Suddenly the weeks of nothing caught up to me, my locked knees, my clenched mouth. All of it wound into a tight, black knot behind my eyes and swallowed me up.
The men and the trees disappeared before me and I began to fall into wretched, blessed unconsciousness.
My name is Mireilles . . . and I float away. And I did. As the world went black, someone picked me up, and began to carry me.
12
Chaplain George Piccadilly
Monet should have painted her. Or if not Monet, one of those other great men who can do great things with paintbrushes. Who was the one who painted the Mona Lisa? Monsieur Lisa, was that his name? Whoever he was, he should have painted her, and then we’d all have properly high-priced reproductions of the Angel of Argonne on our walls.
But perhaps none could capture the ethereal beauty of a creature so untouched by civilization that she seemed perfect in every way.
Perfect, I say. Oh, she looked positively savage, but beautiful all the more for it.
Matthew Petticrew, the horse groom from Harvard, of all people, carried her through the woods and I rather detested him in that moment.
“Petticrew,” I hissed. “Let me have a turn.”
He didn’t even acknowledge me, the cad.
“Where are you taking her?” This, from Henry. Hank. Whichever one he was, and I assure you I never could quite tell which of his alter egos I was conversing with: Henry, the farm boy who seemed more soldier than story-chaser, or Hank Jones, the dimpled, bespectacled chap who America had taken under her wing as the face of the soldiers “over there.”
Well, we were “over there” right now, and the light was dawning and we were going to miss breakfast, and if we did, it’d be hours and hours before we ate again.
Where was that potato?
A lump in Petticrew’s sack answered me.
“Pssst,” I said. “Where are we going?”
Petticrew slowed to a walk but refused to stop. “I . . . I don’t know,” he said. “I couldn’t leave her there, alone like tha
t, and—afflicted. And we can’t take her to the front. “
“They have food at the front,” I said.
“Imagine what the men would do. Imagine what she’d think, waking up in a place like that. She’s been through enough.”
“There,” Hank said, pointing like he’d just released his bow, sailed his arrow, and landed a bull’s-eye on his next story. “Look there!”
It was a light. A lantern, just as low on fuel as we were by the looks of it, but enough to direct our collective attention. The sky was light enough to see the outline of a small structure.
“A garden shed,” I said, pointing and feeling properly valiant for it. Mayhap, if we were lucky, there would be more potatoes inside. Harris always kept a sack of potatoes in the garden shed at Winterbourne when I was a lad. Perhaps this shed was the same.
Matthew stopped just short of it and looked at me as if I’d fallen from Jupiter. “That would be a house, George.”
As if I should know. “Well, we can’t all grow up in the vaulted auspices of the groom’s quarters, now, can we? How was I to know houses came that small?”
But as we drew near, even I could sense this was no ordinary structure, whatever it was. It held the air of a great keeper of secrets.
Matthew hesitated only a moment before knocking.
“What are you doing?” Hank whispered. “We don’t know who lives there.”
Matthew looked around, as if trying to fortify his own thoughts. “Yes, we do.” He nodded at the lady in his arms.
“How do you know?” Henry or Hank asked, narrowing his eyes behind his spectacles. That was definitely a reporter look emerging.
“Who else could it belong to? Nobody lives in these woods. At least nobody who anyone’s ever heard of. We’re so deep in, it’ll be a miracle if we can get back out by nightfall tonight. And we just happen to find a—a woman, and a house, together? It has to be hers.”
Nobody answered the knock. The whole place had an air of a waiting thing, as if it were sizing us up and tapping its garden-shed foot impatiently, the dastardly thing. Asking if we were soldiers or not, and if yes, why didn’t we do something to prove it?
Hank looked over his shoulder as if the whole of Washington might rush in and apprehend him if he made a misstep. And then he plunged forward, opening the door.
It creaked, but oddly it was a merry sort of creak. Abandoned garden-shed-like dwellings with mysterious lanterns spitting to a fizzle should have a creak much more formidable.
I don’t know whether it was the shelf stuffed to the brim with books, or the hearth with a rocking chair beside it and a blanket draped ready to welcome a windblown chap, or the tiny corner kitchen where morning light yellowed the floor, but the house made me rather thirsty for home, though I had no earthly idea where “home” might be for me.
No heavenly idea, I reminded myself. I had to start sounding more pious.
Petticrew laid the Angel down upon the one bed, all made up with a worn quilt in the corner, tucked partially beneath stairs that led to a loft. And then we waited. The ticking of a cuckoo clock marched seconds past, and we waited still. We were as useless as a passel of dwarves finding Snow White asleep in their forest hovel. What did one do with a damsel who had quite lost her senses? Literally, was unconscious?
“We shall break bread,” I said, raising my brows and infusing my slow-spoken words with holy gravitas. There was that potato, after all, and someone had better cook it.
The others didn’t hear me, apparently.
I spotted a well through the kitchen window and a pot on the stove, and went to work.
It is hard work, filling a pot with water. One doesn’t like to complain, though, and before long I would be an expert at it, surely.
Back inside I opened the stove and set to work building a fire. A cloud of dust swarmed me with a vengeance.
A shuffling sounded, and Petticrew had the stove door shut just as I erupted into a coughing fit.
“Fine,” I coughed. “I’m fine. No need to worry.”
But the only thing Petticrew was worrying over was the fire. He turned a handle that did something or other, and the billows of smoke began to dissipate.
Pious. Sound pious.
“A pillar of smoke shall lead them,” I said, gesturing at the white tendrils of ash.
“Fire,” Jones said, jotting something down. I had a wish or two concerning that notepad of his and that fireplace.
“Pardon?” I sloshed the pot of water onto the stove and plunked in the potato. There. It’d be ready in no time, surely.
“A pillar of fire led the Israelites in the desert,” he said. “Not smoke.”
Right. “Just so.”
Petticrew had gone to the window and was studying the terrain. Jones was perusing the corner bookshelf, pulling out books whose old covers appeared scrawled in French. That didn’t seem to deter him, though.
Rummaging through a crock on the counter with a crack running down it, I pulled out a fork and stabbed the potato. Hard as a rock. I rather wished at that point that I’d paid attention when they’d talked at us at Plattsburg about being prepared and campfire cooking and all that sort of rot.
Perhaps if I cut it up, it might go faster. I salted the water, thinking to make a soup. That was likely how one made soup, I surmised. And as I set to slicing that spud, Jones stood suddenly, toppling the stool he’d perched on in front of the bookcase.
“I knew it,” he said. “I knew it.”
“Knew what?” I held the potato and sliced through it, nearly spearing my own palm in the process. Petticrew yanked it from me, along with the knife, and set it on the wooden counter to chop.
Hank Jones’s eyes darted back and forth across the pages of the book he held at a feverish pace. “It’s impossible, though.”
Petticrew laid down the knife rather firmly. “What is it,” he said, quieting his voice so as not to wake Sleeping Beauty, but his frustration simmered behind his words.
Jones looked at the girl. He took in the rustic chalet, more a cabin than anything so fancy sounding as “chalet,” if you asked me. And again he shook his head.
“You know about the Fontinelles?” he said, turning suddenly as if he had come to life, wet rag that he was. Why, there appeared to be a beating heart within that book-brain, after all.
“Fontinelles,” said I. “A family of cheeses known for their dull taste. Relatives of yours, are they?”
“The Fontinelles are not cheeses,” said the wet rag, with the most disdain I’d heard from him yet. “They’re people. Or were, rather. Until they disappeared.”
Petticrew half listened as he checked on his patient. Listening for her breathing, covering her with a blanket. “Quite the nursemaid, aren’t you?”
He didn’t even look at me. He left her side, plopped the potato chunks in the boiling water, and paced. “You were saying?”
“The Marquis Fontinelle was a remarkable man,” he said. “He was aristocracy, almost fifty years ago. France has a long history of revolting against its aristocracy. But the Marquis managed to be a peacemaker among his peers and his tenants—and by daring to live outside the stride of expectations, he became a local hero of sorts. His writings have been studied for decades now. His ideas seemed revolutionary at the time, but looking back, people believe they could have spared the city a lot of turmoil, if they’d been adopted. Maybe even helped to prevent invasion. But . . . they were invaded. By the Prussians. And when they were, he became a target.”
“Of who?” Petticrew said, leaning forward.
“Yes, of whom?” I said, folding my arms over my chest.
“All parties involved,” said Jones. “His peers did not like the hunger for independence that the tenants showed. His tenants did not like the general solidarity of the aristocrats or the oppression of their heavy-handed ways in keeping them poor and their children hungry. And then the Prussians, who wanted to take Paris, shut the whole place in, cut off the city entirely. No way into the c
ity, no way out. Except for one.”
Jones paused as the Angel stirred over on her bed. She let out a small groan, which had Petticrew watching her like a hawk with a pained expression on his face. He was looking perpetually wounded these days.
“Do stop brooding,” I said, throwing a kitchen rag at him.
He did not reply. Only glared.
“That,” I said, pointing in his face. “See? Brooding. Stop it. You’re not the one dying of hunger.”
“I know that,” he whispered fiercely. “But she’ll get some food, soon enough.” He jerked his head toward the potato pot.
I didn’t tell him I’d been talking about me. “Quite,” I said. My stomach rumbled.
Petticrew returned his attention to Wet Rag Henry. “One way out of the city,” he said, signaling the story to go on.
Jones stood. “I can’t believe you don’t know the story,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “We can’t all be walking encyclopedias.”
“It’s the stuff of legends,” he said, unfazed. One of the greatest mysteries of our time. Or rather, the generation before us.” Henry’s speech sped up and he seemed nearly human and not so book-like in his growing enthusiasm. “You see, the French are an industrious people and found a way to communicate with their families outside of the city.”
“Carrier pigeons?” Matthew said, looking more interested.
“Gas balloons. They began to use them during the Franco-Prussian War to steal bundles of correspondence out of the city. Launching in the dead of night, silent as could be.”
“Gas balloons,” I said, unable to keep the spark from my voice. My father had been a member of an aero club in London and took me to see the great race when first it began in Tuileries Gardens in old Paris. I was young then—only a boy—but well did I recollect how my soul lifted right along with the sea of orbs rising into the great beyond. My father and I had never been close, but that day was one for the ages.