Once More Unto the Breach Page 15

  Charlotte glanced at me, her jaw tight. “Don’t do it.”

  He squeezed the trigger, and the report of the bullet was drowned out by my helpless shout. Charlotte flinched, but she did not fall. I moved toward her.

  “Halt! I will not miss her again. Drop the gun.”

  Charlotte’s eyes were wide as she met my gaze. The bullet had gone over her head, but her face was leeched of color.

  “I will not ask again.”

  “Do not shoot her.” I bent and placed the Luger at my feet and then straightened. I raised my hands.

  “Now, both of you, on your knees.” We glanced at one another, and he strode toward us. “On your knees now! Put your hands behind your head.”

  “Do it,” I said, voice low.

  Charlotte’s lips tightened, but she obeyed, lacing her fingers behind her head and lowering to kneel on the stone floor. I followed suit, but I did not lace my fingers together. I stacked my hands behind my head and watched the German closely.

  He stopped within a meter from where I knelt, but then he wisely took several steps back out of range. “I will not—”

  The blast of a rifle interrupted him. I dove for Charlotte, pressing her flat to the floor as I drew one of the pistols from where it was tucked at my back. The German’s gun dropped as his hands came up to cover the gaping hole in his chest. He stared at me, face frozen in shock.

  He dropped to his knees and then slumped to the side, revealing the abbess standing behind him with a rifle clutched in her hands.

  30 May 1942

  Dear Nhad,

  I saw a child today, no older than eight or nine years of age,

  wearing a yellow badge upon her sleeve. A Star of David.

  Already Jews are barred from restaurants and other public places.

  Their synagogues attacked and vandalized.

  Now they are branded…I grow more and more uneasy.

  -Owain

  xv

  The abbess’s face was blank, blood spilling over her chin from a split lip, a knot welling over her left eye. The mask slipped, though, and her face crumbled in horror.

  I gained my feet and lifted Charlotte to hers. “Are you well?” I passed a hand over her hair to reassure myself the bullet had left her unscathed.

  She nodded, but I felt a fine tremor pass through her. She approached Mother Clémence slowly, and the abbess allowed Charlotte to relieve the rifle from her shaking hands.

  “What have I done?” She crossed herself, voice desolate. “What have you done?” Charlotte and I met one another’s gaze. “More will come now. The children…”

  “Where does Owain take the children from here?” I looked to Charlotte.

  She spoke before I could say more. “We can take the children to safety.”

  Mother Clémence shook her head. “You do not understand. I…I do not know. Only Owain and Sévèrin knew.”

  “There must be a map.”

  “There is no map. Only a note Owain left for Sévèrin.”

  “A note?”

  “Oui. They rarely traveled together. Only within the last months had they begun doing so. The abbey was their meeting place, but Owain left instructions for Sévèrin should he be…delayed. It was never needed. Until now. And we cannot read it.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged, spreading her hands in a helpless gesture in response to Charlotte’s query. “The language is strange. It is neither French nor English. We do not—”

  “Let me see it.”

  Both women were startled by the abruptness of my tone, but the abbess nodded. “Permit me to see to Sister Angelique. Then I will meet you in my study.”

  _______

  He had written the note in Welsh.

  “Can you read this?”

  “Aye.” I ran my finger over the scrawl of letters, feeling where his pen had dug uneven furrows into the paper. While Mother Clémence had seen to the wounded young woman in the larder and settled her into bed, I had washed at the well. My shirt was stained irreparably, and I absently noted the brown blood caked around the nail of my thumb. “Take the mountain road 'round the school of clocks to the horseshoe. Cross the white horse and look to the water at dawn. Does that mean anything to you?”

  The abbess paced away. “Read it once more to me.” I did so and her brow wrinkled. “There is a school in Cluses. L’École d’horlogerie.”

  “Watchmaking?” Charlotte translated.

  “Oui. And you said horseshoe? What is this in French?”

  “Fer à cheval,” Charlotte said.

  “Fer à cheval,” she whispered. “Sixt-fer-à-Cheval. It is a village, and the white horse. Le Cheval Blanc. It is a mountain on the border in the Chablais Alps.”

  I folded the paper and tucked it into my pocket alongside the worn letter. “How many are there of you?”

  “Quelle?”

  “How many? You, the young nun. Who else?”

  “It is only the two. Myself and Sister Angelique. The others are gone. I sent them away. I had to stay for the children, and Sister Angelique…” She looked away. “This is her only home now.”

  “Pack up what you do not want left behind. You may seek shelter in the village, or you may come with us. But we all leave tonight.”

  _______

  We left the dead where they lay.

  Charlotte pulled the ambulance from the barn and backed it close to the entrance of the church. As she and the abbess gathered the children from the hidden chapel, I stripped the bodies of weapons and ammunitions.

  Otto raced out of the dark, wary of the strewn bodies, and followed close at my side as I loaded the cache into the ambulance, stowing the arsenal out of easy reach of the children. I kept three guns on me and reloaded the magazines as I turned and peered out into the night.

  The front gate listed on its hinges. The two vehicles the Germans had driven through the gate sat crippled in the courtyard by Charlotte’s mechanical knowledge.

  The surrounding woods were deep but alive with the sounds of darkling creatures. I patted my pocket, seeking my cigarette, before I recalled its loss. The burn on my forearm was a quiet throb.

  Footsteps and whispers alerted me to the approach, and I turned to find Charlotte and Mother Clémence hurrying the small band of children through the church. Their eyes were wide, faces colorless and frightened, and I cursed the lack of foresight in not hiding the bodies from them. Their small faces were already haunted enough.

  “Rapidement maintenant, les infants,” Charlotte whispered, touching their shoulders when several stopped to stare at the fallen Germans.

  Two of the younger girls began to cry, and the infant whimpered. The abbess shifted the infant to the crook of one arm and lifted the smallest girl to her hip, doing her best to soothe them.

  The young boy I had held earlier spotted me and broke away from the group. He greeted Otto first, sticking his face in the poodle’s to kiss the canine’s narrow muzzle. The dog made no protest, and his tail wagged as he licked the boy across his cherubic face.

  The child turned to me and raised his arms. I picked him up, and he leaned forward to wrap his arms around my neck. I held him for a moment, the weight of him taking me back years, before I patted his back and placed him in the rear of the ambulance. Otto leapt in after him, and I pointed to the far end of the stretcher. Boy and dog obeyed.

  Charlotte climbed in after them, and I handed the children up to her one after the other. Each carried a blanket and little else, and she settled them on our bedrolls.

  I turned to the abbess and lifted the older child from her arms.

  “We will come with you. I would see the children to safety.” She glanced back into the church. “And be away from this place.” She took a deep breath and touched the swelling on her forehead. “Will you assist me with Sister Angelique?”

  “Aye.”

  “I gave her medicine to aid her sleep. I think it best
this way.” She handed the infant up to Charlotte. “Come.”

  She directed me back through the church and rectory and up a flight of stairs. The room she led me to was spartan, bare save for the narrow bed and a bedside table. The nun slept curled on her side, hands fisted under her chin. Her eyelids flickered in sleep, and she flinched when the abbess tucked the worn blanket closer about her. I could not imagine her sleep was peaceful.

  “You did not know your son was smuggling children to safety.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck and answered her honestly. “No. Are they all Jews?”

  She folded several garments and blankets into a satchel. “The oldest child and the youngest are Romani. And you have met Hugo.”

  I lifted the woman into my arms. Even with the additional weight of her unborn child, she was painfully light, and her head lolled against my shoulder. She whimpered in her drug-induced sleep. “The boy with the curious features.”

  “Oui.” She placed the bible on the night stand in the satchel and led the way back through the dormitory. “He is a Mongoloid.”

  I was not familiar with the term. “And the children’s parents?”

  “Gone on the trains or dead, I am certain. I do not know the details. Only that your son was their only hope for safety.”

  _______

  We drove into the night, winding through valleys shadowed by ever-taller peaks.

  “Left here.” I turned off the torch and re-folded the map. Thônes slept as we passed over its cobbled lanes, and moonlight rippled over the stream that ran parallel to the gravel track we followed. “This road will lead us all the way to Cluses.”

  “I have been lying to you.”

  I turned to study Charlotte’s profile. She had been silent since we left Digny-Saint-Clair, silent save for the chattering of her teeth and her soft, “No,” when I asked if she was cold. “Owain was your contact.”

  She glanced at me, and a glimmer of a smile crossed her drawn face. “I thought you must have known.”

  “You said his name in Paris before I could tell you it was Owain.”

  She nodded. “You are right. He was my contact. I knew no more than his name, but when I saw you, I knew you had to be his father. I mistook you for Owain himself when I first saw them drag you into the alley.”

  “Why do you seek him?”

  “In September of ’42, he failed to make a rendezvous, and he simply…disappeared. There was no talk of him being captured or killed. He was simply gone. As were a number of the paintings he had been tasked with smuggling out of Paris.”

  I glanced at her sharply. “You think he stole the paintings.”

  She hesitated, tapping a finger against the steering wheel. “I was a cataloguer at the Louvre. Records, bibliographies, numbers. Those are what I am most familiar with. And I kept a log of everything, on both ends.”

  “And the numbers did not add up.”

  “No. Eleven paintings went missing between my handling and the receiving at the other end of the channel. Owain was not my only contact. We had half a dozen people tasked with transporting art out of Paris. But in all the shipments where the numbers did not add up, Owain was the constant.”

  “You want answers from him, then.”

  “I do. I spent a year scouring Paris for him to no avail. Three of those paintings were from my great-aunt’s collection. Dionne’s grandmother. She married a Jewish man, though thankfully both were gone long before the war began and my cousin has been able to keep her heritage a secret. Dionne had no interest in art, but Tatie knew of my love. They were my favorite paintings from her collection, and she left them to me when she died.”

  “I am sorry.”

  “I am as well. I had given up finding them. Until I saw you in the alley in Paris.”

  “He would not have taken those paintings for himself.”

  “I believe you. But that is what my records show. He and his partner—” Her voice cut off abruptly, and she slowed the ambulance. “His partner.”

  “You mentioned one before. Did you know him?”

  “No, not even his name. I only saw him a few times, I mainly dealt with Owain. But…”

  “But?”

  “The doctor in Lyon after the fire. I thought I recognized him, but I could not place him at the time.”

  “And now?”

  “Now, I…I am certain it was Owain’s partner. But that is impossible.”

  “Why?”

  She shifted gears, and the moon raced with us along the dark ribbon of the mountain road. “Because there was rumor that Owain had killed his partner before disappearing.”

  __________

  I did not risk sleep when we pulled into an abandoned barn in a quiet valley in the hours before dawn. I knew what awaited me in slumber, and I did not care to revisit the battlefields with the closing of my eyes.

  The stalls were all empty, and I spread fresh hay in the deepest pen furthest from the doors. While the others slept, I kept watch.

  The children had remained silent as we bedded them down, exhaustion and fright rendering them hollowed phantoms of young innocence. The abbess leaned against the wood plank wall in the midst of their tightly curled bodies with the nun’s head cradled in her lap. The young woman had not stirred as I carried her from the ambulance, and she slept on now, though I knew from the rigid stillness of her shadow that the abbess sat sleepless.

  Charlotte slept on her side with her knees drawn up around the infant and Otto lying at her back. When she flinched and murmured in sleep, I place a hand on her shoulder. She eased at my touch, a slight sigh escaping her, and it was a temptation to allow my hand to linger.

  I withdrew, rubbing Otto’s ears when he lifted his head, and turned back to watch the entrance of the barn from where I sat leaning in the doorway of the stall. The open entrance remained dark and empty.

  A rustle of movement drew my attention into the stall, and the boy named Hugo approached me with his blanket trailing after him. Since I was seated, we were eye to eye, and he met my gaze for a moment before he blinked owlishly and yawned.

  I sat unmoving as he knelt and climbed into my lap, leaning against my chest. The sensation was so hauntingly familiar a lump rose in my throat as I shook out the blanket and settled it around him. I rested my hand on his back. He soon grew limp and heavy against me, and when I closed my eyes, it was not the Somme or Ypres that met me but Owain.

  “Get out. I will not call a coward my son.”

  The small face looking up at me crumbled. He reached for my hand, but I turned and strode away.

  “Dadi!” His voice was frightened and plaintive. “Dadi, please! Wait for me!”

  I glanced back to find him struggling to follow me. His short legs, even as sturdy as they were, no match for my stride.

  He held his arms out to me. “Os gwelwch yn dda, Dadi.”

  I ignored him, and his sobs and cries followed me as I climbed our hills. The sky was dark and foreboding overhead.

  Owain’s calls suddenly fell silent. I turned back, but the hills around me were empty.

  “Owain?”

  A mist crept over the hills, and with it came the sound of weeping as it curled around my ankles. The heather grew thorns and caught at my legs as I ventured downhill, and rocks rolled underfoot.

  “Owain? Where are you, machgen i? Owain!”

  Wind swept over the land, and it drowned my shouts.

  When I finally heard his voice, it was a whisper directly at my ear. “Dadi, help me.”

  I lurched awake so abruptly I floundered in finding my bearings. For a moment, I thought the child sleeping against my chest was Owain, and I clung to him before the boy in my arms shifted and murmured in French.

  I released an unsteady breath and glanced around. Dawn was encroaching upon the night, and the darkness was beginning to lighten. The children, Charlotte, and Otto still lay sleeping. The nun’s rest was troubled, for she shuddered and whim
pered in sleep. The abbess was not there to soothe her.

  I eased Hugo off my lap and placed him in the hay at Otto’s side. Moving through the shadows of the barn, I checked each stall and the rear of the ambulance to no avail. As I approached the entrance of the barn, though, I heard the sound of retching. I stopped and listened as the heaving soon turned to the sound of quiet weeping.

  The murmur of voices drew my attention back to the stall, and the tone of the exchange had me crossing the distance quickly. A beam of torchlight sliced the dark recesses.

  “Rhys? Rhys!”

  The panic in Charlotte’s voice made me break into a run, and when I reached the stall, I drew short at the scene before me.

  Charlotte knelt beside the nun, who lay curled on her side moaning. Sister Angelique’s face was twisted in pain, her arms clutched around her stomach. A growing pool of blood spread under her.

  Charlotte rested her hand on the woman’s hip, and when she looked up at me, the fear was evident on her face in the harsh gleam of torchlight. “She’s bleeding,” she said needlessly.

  “Get the children in the ambulance.”

  She hurried to do so as I gently lifted the nun in my arms. She was too wracked by pain to flinch away from me.

  The abbess was wiping her eyes when she came into view, and her face creased in worry. “Que s’est-il passé?”

  “We must get her to a hospital immediately.”

  The nun cried out, grasping her stomach with one hand, the fingers of her other hand digging into my shoulder. I felt the graze from the bullet in Vichy begin to bleed under her grip.

  The abbess crossed herself and hurried to help usher the children into the ambulance. “There is a hospital in Cluses. My nephew is a doctor there.”

  I climbed into the back of the ambulance. “Sit and allow her to lean against you,” I told Mother Clémence, and then turned to Charlotte. “Get us to Cluses as quickly as you can.”

  She nodded and whistled to Otto, who leapt into the back before she closed the doors. The poodle settled on the opposite stretcher bearer, and the children huddled around him, faces etched in fear and confusion.