“Rest?” I ask. “Why on earth would I rest? You’re the one who’s been working night and day.”
He pushes my hair back from my face. “You were so ill, Sarah. Your fever just broke this morning.” His lips press to my forehead. “Dieu. I’ve never been so terrified.”
I still. What is he talking about? Yesterday I helped him in the fields, and then we sat on the small porch with a bottle of wine, bickering in that way we do—more foreplay than argument.
“Fever?” I ask. “As I recall, last night you were offering me your ill-informed opinions about Matisse and I was soundly proving you wrong.”
He steps back, holding a hand to my forehead. “No, love. We’ve never discussed Matisse. You’ve been ill, remember? For days and days. Out of your mind. Telling us someone was drugging you and Marie.” He shakes his head. “I wonder if you’re still ill.”
I stare at him. I remember the past few days. I remember our bath, I remember the day we swam in the lake together, and the way he pulled me into a corner of the barn to kiss me as the hired hands drove away. I remember all of it and yet he does not.
My eyes open. Marie lies beside me, staring at the wall without a glimmer of recognition. And slowly I realize what is happening during these times I go back to visit Henri.
I’m not merely remembering what existed. I’m rewriting it.
Our amazing summer together, our fall. I’m papering over every perfect memory, and soon, he won’t remember any of those days as they actually were. He’ll instead recall this drugged version of me, spouting nonsense about things he’s sure haven’t happened.
And perhaps that’s a version he won’t wait for after all.
I begin, the next day, to listen. Every time the guards walk past, I am cataloguing their words and their worries and their petty resentments, grabbing hold of anything that might one day prove useful, that might help me see a pattern.
They each take shifts digging a hole down the hallway. I’ve heard the ringing of pickaxes since I regained consciousness, but no one seems to mention what it’s for. They’re too focused on bickering about whose day it is to dig.
In the common room I no longer hide in the far corner but instead sit nearest the guards’ desk, the most dangerous point in the room. I’m bumped, pushed from my chair, hit in the head. The guards seem to resent us for their roles here, as if they’re the victims. They take a sick pleasure from the casual harm they wreak, and inside me I discover this small seed of rage in my chest, something that laid dormant until now. Every day it seems to grow a little more. Every day I become a little more like them: I’d take a sick pleasure in harming them if I could too.
Especially Gustave.
He only strikes me occasionally, and sometimes yanks my hair as he passes, but it’s more in the way of a mean boy with a crush—I can live with that. But the other times, when he pushes his meaty fingers through my hair, lets them trail over my hip or chest as I pass...those times leave me feeling a type of rage that scares me.
Today he slides his hand inside my neckline to grab my breast. I force myself not to react, but fury seems to radiate out from that place of anger until I can feel it in every limb, in each finger and toe.
“You’d better not let him see you do that,” warns the other guard.
He removes his hand, and I feel sick with relief. “Monsieur Coron?” asks Gustave. “He won’t be here until the end of the week.”
“And when he hears that only one of them has woken, he’ll be in a foul mood, so don’t make it worse, eh?”
“Do you suppose once he’s made his choice, he’ll let us make ours?” Gustave asks, lifting my hem with his foot. He laughs. “Unlike him, I require nothing special of the women who bear my children other than the ability to lie still.”
All the breath is pushed from my chest. This is why no one is trying to win us over. Monsieur Coron, or whoever he’s working for, is not interested in gaining powerful allies. He’s interested in creating them—infants he can shape and mold to his liking. It explains why we are all young. I’ve got no doubt about what happened to the older women who arrived, like Marie’s mother. I’ve got no doubt about what they’ll do with us too, eventually.
I’ve got to get us out of here. Henri, I beg silently, help me. Show me how to escape. My eyes open and I’m still in the common room, still surrounded by women with dead eyes. Still completely on my own.
5
SARAH
That evening, Marie’s fingers begin to jerk. When she wakes the next day, for only a moment, there is a startled awareness in her eyes. It fades away to nothing before I can capture it. She’s waking, and whether that’s a good thing or bad, it’s vital that it happens without the guards noticing, and that it happens before this Monsieur Coron, whoever he is, arrives.
That night at dinner, when the guards aren’t looking, I knock the spoon out of Marie’s hand. It falls to the floor, and she blinks before lowering her face to the bowl, to lap up its contents like a cat. “No, Marie,” I whisper, pushing a roll in front of her. “Eat this.”
She knocks it away and the sound, as it falls to the floor, attracts the notice of a guard.
When he moves past us, I try again. “Marie, it’s Amelie,” I whisper. “We’re trapped in 1918. Remember? You need to wake up. You have to stop eating.”
There is still no response. I glance at the guards who stand at the end of the table and then I reach for her tray.
A hand belonging to the woman beside her comes down to stop its movement.
“Are you insane?” she hisses. “Stop before the guards notice you.”
I freeze, more startled than scared. It’s been so long since I’ve heard a female voice that I’d almost forgotten it was possible. I allow myself a quick glance at the owner of that hand and voice and find the woman I saw the week before—the one who flickers in and out, the way I do. And she is absolutely clear-eyed. My heart begins to beat a little faster at the idea that I’m not in this alone. Between the two of us, surely, we can come up with a plan.
My mouth opens and she shakes her head. “Not here.”
Only the dormitory offers a chance of being left alone long enough to talk, and it’s late when she appears beside my bed. “My name is Katrin,” she says. She’s speaking French but her accent is strong. Swedish, perhaps. “We don’t have long, but you must be careful. They’re looking for descendants of the first families—so you can’t let them know you’re awake.”
“I don’t plan to,” I reply, “but I’m not from one of the first families so maybe it won’t matter.”
Her brow furrows. “Of course you are. How else do you think you woke early?”
I shrug. “I was sort of in two places at the same time, after we arrived. I think maybe the drug was diluted for me.”
She stills. “Two places at once?” she whispers. She leans closer, staring at my face as if she’s trying to read something there. “But that’s my gift.”
Not much of a gift, I think, as she continues.