A Coming Evil (15 page)

Gerard gave the faintest of smiles. "Renaud was a lawyer at heart. If anybody could have done anything for us ... He said that we should be held in custody by the Church rather than by the civil authorities. He tried to ensure security for witnesses, both Templars
and outsiders who would testify on our behalf. He demanded an inquiry into deathbed confessions, where many had recanted their earlier confessions of the charges against us. He said that those who accused us should appear before the commission, and that when the brothers were being examined by the commission, the king's agents should not be present."

All reasonable requests,
Lisette thought. "What happened?"

"Several of the commissioners refused to attend the hearings; perhaps they were afraid, perhaps loyal to the king, I don't know why. Still, we gave our testimony. Lisette, sometimes somebody would speak in the morning, maintaining his innocence, then the same person would be brought back that afternoon or the next day, and suddenly his hands were bloodied and bandaged, or he couldn't even walk but was dragged in by the jailers, spitting blood or moaning in pain, and he'd say, 'Oh, I misunderstood the question. Yes, I did all those things.'"

"Couldn't anybody see—"

"They could see," Gerard said. "They could see. Sympathizers spread the word. In other lands—England, Scotland, Aragon—there were no confessions. Just in France. And in France, while the hearings were still going on, they loaded onto carts fifty-four of the men who had come forward to speak, and they took them outside Paris, where they burned them as relapsed heretics."

"Was that the end of the papal commission?"

"No. All in all it went on for more than two years. There were still some who spoke out, who said, 'I may eventually deny this, but that will be because of pain or fear: the Templars are innocent.' There were more burnings. Renaud de Provins was scheduled to die, but the commissioners demanded his return, since he was one of the leaders of the defense. Pierre de Bologna disappeared. They said he escaped." Gerard shook his head. "I don't know; it could be. I ... find this difficult to believe. Brothers who had offered to defend the Order renounced that offer." He was biting his lip. "I was one of those."

"Gerard—" Lisette started.

"The commission adjourned for six months. When it reconvened, more commissioners refused to attend. Pierre was gone, whether escaped or dead, and Renaud was prohibited from attending the hearings because the Archbishop of Sens—who was a friend of the king, who had been appointed by the king—had degraded him from priesthood. Sir Guillaume and Sir Bertrand asked to be excused because they were unlettered men who didn't know the law, and I'm afraid I never quite noticed when Robert Vigier stopped attending, but it was much earlier." Gerard took a deep breath. "Eventually, the pope called an assembly. He announced that the Order could not be convicted on the evidence—"

Lisette gave a start, surprised.

"—but that he was personally convinced of our guilt. Those who had confessed and who had not renounced their confessions were released. Anyone who had refused to confess or who had retracted his confession was condemned to perpetual imprisonment."

"There were some who hadn't confessed?" Lisette asked. "Despite the torture?" And something about his expression made her ask, though she had thought earlier that he must have given in, "Were you one of them?"

"Yes," he said, barely loud enough to hear. "Eventually Jacques de Molay realized the pope would not defend us. Eventually he admitted that he had lied in confessing because of the torture. They burned him the next day. One of the jailers told us that Molay proclaimed his innocence even as the flames consumed him, that he called Philippe and Clement to meet him before God for judgment."

So that was why Gerard hadn't been surprised to hear that they'd all died the same year.

Lisette closed the book. She wanted to know what had happened to Gerard but couldn't bring herself to ask.

Perhaps he could tell. Or perhaps it was just the logical end to his story. "I died in jail of my injuries," he said, in a voice that sounded much less emotional than when he had been describing the hearings.

"Without confessing," Lisette finished for him. Surely that counted for something.

"I should have confessed," Gerard said. "I accomplished nothing." And then the calm and flat voice was shown to be false for he buried his face in his hands and his shoulders began to shake.

Instinctively Lisette threw her arms around him and she rocked him back and forth the way her mother used to do for her when she'd fallen or been upset. "It's all right," she murmured. "It's all over now," which had to be the stupidest thing in the world you could say to a ghost.

But then she realized that she was actually holding Gerard, that she could feel him in her arms and his hot tears on her neck.

"Gerard," Lisette whispered, afraid to break the spell by speaking out loud. "Gerard." She took his hand, the hand that several times had passed through her like a shiver, and twined her fingers about his.

Slowly he raised his head. He looked from their clasped hands to her face.

She put her other hand against his chest. Halfway between a laugh and a sob of relief, she asked, "Can you feel it?" But lest he think she meant only could he feel her hand, she took his free hand and placed it where hers had been. "Can you feel your heart beating?"

He took a deep, shuddering breath. Then he pulled his hands free of hers, but only to throw his arms around her and hold her close. She was afraid she was going to start to cry, and she bit down hard on her lip to prevent it.

That was when she heard a noise from outside that sounded like someone was crying.

Gerard heard it, too. He was already loosening his grip on her when Lisette heard Cecile calling: "Lisette! Lisette!" It wasn't whining; it wasn't anger.
She woke up and couldn't find me,
Lisette thought.
She's frightened.
In fact, Cecile must have been looking for her outside, for her voice wasn't even coming from the direction of the house, but from across the lawn. "Lisette!"

Even still in the barn, with Gerard helping her to her feet, Lisette could hear Cecile's great ragged breaths as she returned, running, from wherever she'd been looking.

"Lisette!" Cecile sobbed.

What could have happened
? Lisette wondered, and thought immediately of Louis Jerome, spreading panic. She opened her mouth to say "I'm here." But before she had a chance, Cecile screamed: "Germans!"

"Cecile!" Lisette shouted. She ran to the open doorway and saw Cecile poised with her hand on the porch door. From within the house there was a commotion, the sound of little feet running. One look at
Cecile's frantic face was enough to convince Lisette of her sincerity.

"They're at Maurice's house," Cecile gasped. "They're coming."

Lisette glanced in that direction, but from this angle the wooded hill stood in the way.

"They're coming!" Cecile screamed at her before doubling over with great racking coughs.

"Easy," Gerard said.

Lisette hadn't even been aware of his coming out behind her. She gasped, remembering their question that had never been answered: What if two people of two different ages saw him at once? For the moment Cecile wasn't seeing him; her eyes were wild and unfocused, and he still looked thirteen.
Run,
Lisette wanted to warn him.
Hide.

"Easy," Gerard said again. He took Cecile by the arm. If Lisette had realized what he was about to do, she would have warned him against that, too. But he took her by the arm, and his hand did not pass through. However, it had happened, he was well and truly there, and as solid as they. He drew Cecile in close the way Lisette had done with him. "Easy." The way he might have calmed a skittish horse.

Cecile took a deep breath. She was either going to howl hysterically or be all right. She looked right up at him. "Who are you?" she demanded.

"Gerard d'Arveyres."

Lisette was watching him, and there was not a flicker of change. Could it be, maybe, that she and
Cecile each saw him at her own age? But that was unlikely. Cecile had her head tipped back to look him in the face. Whatever it was that had caused him to come back to life—whether it was her summoning him that first day or talking to him day after day, or caring about him, or whether it was nothing at all to do with her but something about the alignment of the stars or whatever it was, he seemed to have settled into a thirteen-year-old form.

Either the fact that he was so much taller than Cecile or that Lisette had not gasped and fainted must have let him know that his body wasn't going through any strange changes. "How far away does this Maurice live?" he asked.

"One house away," Lisette said, pointing. "If Cecile took the shortcut through the fields and they're in cars on the road, they're about two minutes behind her." He didn't know about minutes. How could she rephrase that to let him see how little time there was?

But Cecile was shaking her head. "No,"—she was still panting from her run—"they radioed for help."

If that meant from Sibourne, that gave them about fifteen to twenty minutes. "What happened?" Lisette demanded.

"We couldn't find you. We looked all over the house and then I thought you'd probably gone up that hill the way you keep doing."

Lisette spared a quick glance for Gerard.

Cecile said, "But I thought how you were sick last night and I was worried, so I went to Maurice's place
for help. But when I got there, there was a car in the driveway with a German soldier sitting in the driver's seat. I could tell he was only the driver, because he was just sitting there filing his nails, which meant that he was waiting for something or somebody, so I sneaked around the side and got between the bushes under the window and I peeked in."

"Cecile!" Lisette gasped. "You should have come right back here."

Cecile started crying.

"Did they see you?" Lisette asked.

But that must not have been it, for Cecile was shaking her head. "It was those two officers from town who kept whistling at Maman and following her around. They were bothering us the day I went to town with her, and she said they'd been doing it before, too. Today they were standing on the upstairs landing yelling at Maurice and his wife. They must have pulled them right out of their beds because they were still in their nightclothes. The soldiers were saying that Maman was always buying too much food and who was she buying it for? Maurice said that she sometimes shopped for them, since Madame Maurice is in a wheelchair and can't get around, and that Maman always has nieces and nephews staying with her for a week or so at a time. But they didn't believe him. They said that she must be keeping Jews. Maurice said no, she wasn't. And then..." She was taking gulping breaths of air again.

Very gently, Gerard said, "And then..."

"Then they moved Madame Maurice's wheelchair right to the edge of the stairs. And they said, 'Is she keeping Jews?' Lisette, they were going to push her off! Maurice begged them not to and they kept asking, 'Is she keeping Jews?' and finally he said he didn't know, maybe. And they said, 'If she's keeping Jews, where would they be?' And they pushed the chair so that it was half off the top stair and if they let go, it would fall. And Maurice said that many of the old houses have a secret room in the basement."

Lisette gave a cry of frustration.

Gerard was watching her.

"They'll find them," Lisette said, remembering what she'd guessed last night, about the work camps. It wasn't fair that her parents were in Paris and Aunt Josephine was with Uncle Raymond and that
she
was the one left in charge. "If they know to look in the basement, they'll find them."

"But there isn't anyplace else to hide them," Cecile said.

"The caves," Gerard said.

"What caves?" Lisette and Cecile asked simultaneously.

Gerard pointed to where the little wooded hill met the limestone cliff beyond. "My brother and I spent a great deal of time exploring when we were growing up."

There was no time for further questions.

Lisette ran into the house and got the flashlight from under the sink. Gerard took a step back from her
and made a sign of the cross when she flipped the switch, but she didn't have time to worry about that. "Long live France!" she started shouting as she raced down the stairs.

The children must have been frightened by her shouts, or by the sounds of Gerard and Cecile thundering down the stairs behind her.

"Long live France!" she yelled, pounding on the door. "Get out of there now. The Germans are coming and they know where to look."

The door opened a crack and Lisette used her hand to push it open all the way. "Move," she commanded. "Gerard knows where you can hide."

Anne was whimpering. Rachel, perhaps feeling the tension from her brother's arms, had begun crying. They looked at Gerard with big, frightened eyes.

And Gerard was looking at the gas mask covering Etienne's face with much the same expression.

Not now,
she thought. "It's science, not magic," she told him. Then, to the children, again: "Move!"

Finally the words seemed to sink in. But in the seconds it took them to file out, while Lisette pointed her flashlight into the room behind them, she realized this plan wouldn't work.

"Wait," she said.

Cecile looked ready to panic again. "What?"

Lisette indicated the blackout drapes carefully tacked onto the walls. "If they find this room, they'll know."

"So what," Cecile demanded, "if we're in the caves?"

"So they'll wait for us to come back. And your mother will walk right into the middle of it, never suspecting."

Gerard was touching the drapes as though he'd never seen or felt anything like them. Which he probably hadn't. "Can we take this down?" he asked.

"Not easily," Cecile said. "It took my mother two days to get it up."

Louis Jerome said, "What if—"

"Louis Jerome!" Lisette shouted at him.