“It’s better you don’t ask too many questions.” Or at least, that’s what Madame Simon told me when emptying the preventorium’s discretionary cashbox to send me on this mission. She also said, When there’s a war on, it’s best not to tell anyone anything they don’t need to know.
Now Dr. Anglade eyes me warily through his round, wire-rimmed spectacles. “Can you get more?”
I shake my head. It’s somebody else’s turn to risk trading on the black market. Doing it once was impulsive. Twice would be stupid. I’ve always believed that you shouldn’t put your neck out for others unless you want it chopped. So, having done my good deed, I trudge to my classroom, a plain chamber featuring rows of wooden desks for little girls and one for me. Over the door hangs a new portrait of the Marshal, white-haired, white-whiskered, and in uniform. Every teacher in France is supposed to enlist children to send drawings and letters and stories to the new head of state as a so-called Christmas Surprise for the Marshal.
I resent this. Our sick kids are with us at the preventorium only between six months and two years, until they’re cured. My job is to see they don’t fall so far behind in schooling that they can’t pass the examinations for their certificate of primary studies. I teach them reading, writing, and basic mathematics. I don’t have time to teach them about the Marshal or his so-called new National Revolution. Or maybe I just don’t want to, because my feelings about both are mixed. Not that I have the right to judge. I’m no war hero, and everyone says the Marshal is doing the best he can. After all, with half the country occupied by the Nazis, we’re all held at gunpoint, and it’s impossible to know which of the new laws the Marshal is forcing down our throats and which Hitler is forcing down his.
Brooding about this, I make fifteen copies of tomorrow’s spelling test, spreading the master copy out onto the hectograph tablet until the ink is ready. Then I carefully press paper to the gel and smooth it until it’s a perfect mimic. I’m always particular about making worksheets, because it’s about as close to a creative art as I get now that we’re short on pens, paper, charcoal, and paint. And while the copies dry, I look over the Christmas Surprise assignments.
One of my students has drawn the Marshal as a lion wearing a French military cap, because I told her he was called the Lion of Verdun—and I laugh because she’s given her lion a mustache. I’m less amused by the sycophantic essays written by the older girls about how the Marshal has given France the gift of his person. Maybe I’d be feeling more charitable if Henri weren’t in a prison camp under the terms of surrender the Marshal negotiated.
I’m still hungry after a few slices of dried sausage at my desk. Here in the countryside we still have eggs and fruit and even butter—but it never seems like enough. Cigarettes take the edge off, so I’ll have to find a secret spot in the castle to smoke where I can’t be caught by our household management teacher, Faustine Xavier, a prissy little tattletale, who always wears her starched collars too high and her hair pinned too tight. Fortunately, I know all the secret spots. The old hidden feudal passages are too cold this time of year and I’m too claustrophobic to spend much time there anyway, but the attic has sunny windows, which makes it a favorite haunt of the castle cats—and I like it too.
It’s where I used to sculpt and sketch, but no one goes up there anymore, so when I push the ancient door open wider on its rusty hinges, I’m startled to see a silhouette in the window seat. And the silhouette is equally startled by me. “Sacrebleu!” A dark-haired beauty emerges in statuesque splendor, silk blouse, bright red lipstick, and a cigarette holder between her fingers. “I thought you were my maman come to catch me out.”
“Your maman?” I ask, confused.
The elegant stranger stares. “. . . Marthe?”
I stare back without recognition.
She smirks. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
I feel like I should. No artist should forget cheekbones like hers, but lots of people pass in and out of this castle every day, and have every day of my life. Still, I find something familiar about her long dark eyelashes . . .
“About ten years ago,” she prompts. “Maman brought me with her for some holiday function. You were one of the only girls at the orphanage, so I knitted you a red beret . . . and you took me sledding.”
That jogs my memory. I was thirteen, and she was twelve, sporty and boyish. She’s all girl now, which is why I didn’t recognize her as the baron’s daughter. “Anna de LaGrange?”
Flashing an art deco wedding ring set on her left hand that nearly blinds me with the green sparkle of its big emerald baguettes, she says, “I became the comtesse de Guébriant just before the war . . . not that marriage would stop Maman from scolding me like a child if she caught me smoking near her sacred relics.”
She gestures irreverently to the crates filled with old donations to the castle’s museum that haven’t been sorted yet. Uniforms, maps, flags—tokens of the supposedly unbreakable alliance of Western democracies that helped win the last war. But in this war our British allies left us at Dunkirk, and the Americans let Hitler invade us with a neutral shrug. So as far as I’m concerned, these crates contain the detritus of a democratic alliance in decay. And given the current state of affairs, I don’t think a little tobacco smoke is going to do it any more harm . . .
“So you’re a countess now.” I make a whistle that sounds like la-di-da. “Should I curtsy?”
She laughs. “Don’t you dare. I don’t go by the noble title except to irritate Maman with the reminder that I outrank her, but unfortunately she’s too American to care.”
I grin, stooping to pet the gray cat that circles my ankles. “I actually still wear that red beret. Everyone in the village sees me coming a mile away. And don’t worry about your mother. The baroness is too busy pickling everything in reach to come up here.”
Anna pats the window seat beside her in invitation to me, the cat, or both. “I’d offer you a cigarette, but it’s my last one . . .”
“Thanks, I’ve got my own.” I show her the blue package with its winged helmet, but I don’t have a holder like hers and wouldn’t use one if I did. “Gauloises.”
“Gitanes,” Anna says, snapping shut an empty diamond-encrusted cigarette case.
Well, isn’t she all sparkle? Taking a long drag, she says, “This summer, when the air sirens in Paris sent me scrambling, this cigarette case was the only thing of my husband’s I managed to rescue from our apartment. If I’d been thinking clearly, I’d have grabbed the framed picture from the wall. Now all I’ve got to remember him by is this . . .”
She pauses, savoring the distinctive sharp smoke as if tasting a lover’s tongue. I feel as if I’ve intruded upon a private memory until she leans forward to light my cigarette with the glowing end of hers—pulling me into the intimate moment.