Once a Warrior (2 page)

Her death had so devastated her widower that he scarcely noticed the Germans’ lightning-quick strike against France some three months later. When Anne-Marie first came to live with her grandfather, shortly after the
blitzkrieg
, she’d been shocked to see that his hair had grown shaggy, his collar frayed, and his suit looking like a remnant of the Hundred Years’ War. Most distressing of all, however, was the resignation—almost a sense of impending doom—which dwelled in his rheumy eyes.

It was no better now. Henri was still a shadow of his formerly impeccable self. The maid, after sweeping the dirt under the rug and setting an overcooked meal on the table, had quit. And Anne-Marie lived with the guilty knowledge that she had failed to meet Yvonne’s exacting standards.

“
Merde
,” her grandfather cursed after drinking from the small cup. “This exotic ‘coffee’ the Germans are sending us tastes more like one of Hitler’s stupid chemistry experiments every day.”

Giving silent thanks that she had managed to close the living room door before his words took wing and settled in the wrong ears, Anne-Marie walked purposefully to the lace-covered table. “You have a patient.”

“Already?”  His bristly gray brows drew together in a confused frown as he glanced at the mantle clock above the blue-and-white tiled fireplace. “Can’t a man even be allowed—”

“May I clear the table now?”

Something in her sharp tone of voice must have alerted him to the fact that this was no ordinary patient. He nodded and sat back in his chair, the nasty demitasse all but forgotten. Seeing the soup stains on his tie, she reminded herself to spot-clean it before he returned to the office.

“Gestapo.”  She deliberately clattered the china as she whispered the word.

“Here?” he hissed, his voice filled with dark history.

“In the anteroom.”

“But . . . why?”

“He has a bad tooth.”  Ignoring her own growling stomach, she tucked the piece of bread she hadn’t eaten into her skirt pocket for the wounded Royal Air Force pilot whom she was hiding with neither her grandfather’s knowledge nor permission in the garage. “And extremely bad manners.”

“Anne-Marie . . .” Bony fingers which had once been steady enough to perform the most delicate of surgeries but which now trembled with age and fear clasped her wrist with surprising tenacity. “You weren’t rude to him?”

“Of course not.”

When he nodded in relief, she felt a sharp twinge of remorse. Her grandfather had lost so much—even his
raison d’être
, it seemed—that it was only natural he was afraid. Not for himself, of course, but for her and for the rest of his family.

And perhaps of what was yet to come.

It was common knowledge that the Allies, led by the Americans, were going to invade Europe sometime this coming spring. Summer at the latest. The question was, where would the invasion begin?  Convinced that it would come at the narrowest point of the English Channel, the Germans were now concentrating panzer and infantry divisions at the Pas-de-Calais.

But Anne-Marie believed that the
débarquement
might well come elsewhere. She had already learned the code name of the operation, Overlord, from the forbidden British radio broadcasts she listened to in the attic late at night. And the pinprick sabotage pattern by French resisters against German communication and transportation systems, while not yet of a scale to unduly alarm them, made her think that the Allies were planning to attack the coastal batteries behind the beaches at Normandy and move inland from there.

Which could eventually place Ste. Geneviéve in the path of their advance, if not in the thick of battle.

“You mustn’t keep your new patient waiting,
Grand-père
.”  She gently extricated her wrist from his grip. “He has a meeting to attend.”

And if she was lucky, she thought, he might just have some important information to impart under the influence of that expensive cognac.

* * * *

Anne-Marie pulled down the blackout shade on the winter-white moonlight flooding into her drafty bedroom, then turned to her cousin with a preoccupied smile. “I’m sorry, Henriette, I didn’t hear what you said.”

From her kneeling position on the double bed that they were sharing tonight, Henriette Bohec’s eyes glittered excitedly in the chamberstick’s flame that had lit their way up the dark staircase. “I said, I’m going to kiss the first American soldier I see!”

The thunderous snores emanating from their grandfather’s room, directly across the hall, precluded an immediate response on Anne-Marie’s part.

Cupping a protective hand around the flickering candle flame, she crossed to the door her cousin had carelessly left open and shut it with a silence born of practice. At twenty, she was only four years older than the giddy Henriette. Given the danger she’d faced of late, however, she sometimes felt one hundred and four years older.

Tonight was one of those times.

Satisfied that they wouldn’t wake their grandfather, she leaned back against the doorframe with a heavy sigh. After scrubbing the office and washing the dinner dishes with the gritty gray soap that was going to be the ruin of her hands, she had dusted and swept the living area and banked the fire for tomorrow. That she had hours to go before she slept only added to her exhaustion.

Absorbed in her own thoughts, Anne-Marie didn’t realize that Henriette was still waiting for a reply to her earlier statement until she caught the girl’s expectant gaze in the wavering candlelight.

Straightening, she said the first thing that came to mind. “And if the soldier kisses you back?”

“Sticks his tongue in my mouth, you mean?”  Henriette’s horrified tone said that she hadn’t thought before she spoke.

“That’s usually how it happens.”  Even though Anne-Marie’s own experience with kissing was rather limited, her “advanced” age gave her voice the ring of authority.

Henriette mulled that over for a moment before declaring indignantly, “If he uses his tongue, I’ll slap his face!”

“That hardly seems fair.”  Anne-Marie realized she was sweating in spite of the cold that permeated her room. Both she and Henriette wore knitted shawls over and ribbed stockings under the voluminous, high-necked nightgowns they’d taken turns donning in the small bathroom next to their grandfather’s office. Unbeknownst to her cousin, however, Anne-Marie had kept on the skirt and blouse and wool sweater she’d worn today. “First to kiss your liberator and then to slap him.”

Henriette yawned, too tired to argue the point, then scrambled beneath the feather coverlet. She had bicycled the five frigid kilometers from her parents’ farm to the village earlier that evening and was planning to go home tomorrow morning. But not before consuming her share of the eggs she had packed in straw and smuggled in her saddlebags to supplement the Gérards’ usually meager breakfast of bitter ersatz coffee and tough, gray bread.

Candlelight projected Anne-Marie’s well-padded shadow onto the whitewashed wall as she followed her cousin to bed.

To look at them lying side by side, one would never guess they were the daughters of siblings—sister and brother, in fact—because they were polar opposites.

Where Henriette’s dark coloring reflected their Breton heritage, Anne-Marie’s Alsatian roots on her mother’s side had lightened her hair to the shade of wild honey and her eyes to clear amber. Their lack of resemblance didn’t end there. Henriette was short and top-heavy, partly due to nature and partly due to a lifelong diet of cream and butter and cheese, while Anne-Marie had been able to eat from morning till night before the strict wartime rationing set in without gaining an ounce on her taller, more slender frame.

“I think I’ll offer the American a glass of Papa’s Calvados instead of a kiss,” Henriette said in a sleepy voice.

“That certainly sounds less troublesome.”  Anne-Marie blew out the candle, plunging the room into complete darkness, then crossed herself and clasped her hands together.

“What are you doing?”

“Praying.”

Henriette chuckled drowsily. “For Guy Compain, I presume.”

Anne-Marie’s blood froze in her veins. “What makes you say that?”

“Papa told me that he saw you two coming out of the woods near the lake yesterday.”

“Did he seem to think we were doing something wrong?” she asked in a careful voice that betrayed none of her sudden anxiety.

“He said you appeared to be arguing.”  Henriette took most of the coverlet with her when she turned onto her side, giving Anne-Marie her back. “A lover’s quarrel, perhaps?”

Anne-Marie repressed a shudder of revulsion at the very idea of sleeping with Guy Compain. He was brave and uncompromising, she would grant him that, but he was also short and pimply and gauche. The fact that he was one of the few men over the age of eighteen still living in the village instead of doing forced labor in Germany made him, she supposed, a logical paramour in Henriette’s innocent eyes.

“Actually, we were discussing Descartes.”  She affected a reflective tone as she rolled onto her opposite side so that she was lying—literally and figuratively—with her face to the wall.

“Who?”  Sixteen-year-old Henriette was more interested in getting her hands on the latest issue of
Pour Elle
than she was in reading the words of some long-dead philosopher.

“‘
Cogito, ergo sum
’,” Anne-Marie prompted.

“You know I failed my Latin examination.”

“‘I think, therefore I am.’”

 “Oh.”

Enjoying herself at Henriette’s expense was cruel, but Anne-Marie continued, embroidering a tale that rivaled the Bayeux Tapestry for complexity. If nothing else, she decided she would bore her cousin to sleep. “And then, of course, there’s the whole question of mind over matter.”

“What?”

“Do you believe the world exists, or is it only an illusion of our senses?”

“I didn’t realize Guy was so serious,” Henriette admitted after a moment’s pause.

He wasn’t. At least not about things like philosophy. In fact, he’d hated school and often bragged that he’d been expelled for writing BBC messages from the exiled Général de Gaulle on the blackboard during lunch break. Far be it from Anne-Marie, though, to correct Henriette’s erroneous impression.      

Besides, her real concern was her uncle. She didn’t trust him. And with good reason. Not only did Henriette’s father drink too much, but when the Calvados—the potent apple-pulp brandy he brewed from the trees on his farm—had finished dulling his senses, he talked too much.

“Did you father say anything else about Guy and me?” she inquired casually.

“Only that your maman and papa would roll over in their graves at such a liaison,” Henriette mumbled into her pillow.

Tears stung Anne-Marie’s eyes at the mention of her parents, who’d been killed during the June 1940 invasion. One day while she was shopping with a girlfriend near Rouen’s Place du Vieux Marché, the square where Jeanne d’Arc had bravely died at the stake, a German bomb had hit their home and it had burned to the ground. Cringing in a doorway across town as the sirens wailed and the Stukas swept down, she hadn’t known that it was already too late for her mother and father and a younger brother who’d been confined to bed with a touch of flu. Her dear, sweet Papa had come home from his law office for lunch and to check on him.

By nightfall, she’d been both an orphan and a refugee in a world turned upside down. Her immediate family was dead, the old Norman house of her birth had been flattened, and longtime neighbors were preparing to live without any sanitary facilities in cellars and in hovels made from blackened beams and planks. The next day she’d fled the rubble of Rouen with only the clothes on her back, joining the long line of defeated people plodding south, bypassing numerous other burned-out villages and praying that her father’s younger sister would take her in.

But her aunt was a farmer’s wife with four sons and a daughter of her own to feed. And her uncle, who had just received notice that the Germans were requisitioning his wheat harvest, had emphatically said “No more!”  Her grief–stricken grandfather, however, had gladly welcomed his son’s only surviving child into his home. Anne-Marie had lived with him ever since, earning her certificate from the local
lycée
and her keep by helping around the house and assisting him in his office.

It was the perfect “cover” for her Résistance work.

Resisting the Germans was, in fact, a family tradition. When the Prussians invaded Alsace in 1870, her maternal grandparents, who were determined to remain French, had moved to Caen, where her mother was born. And when the “war to end all wars” broke out in 1914 and France found herself crossing swords with Germany yet again, her father, a law clerk in Rouen, had sallied forth.

Now it was her generation’s turn to answer the bugles of patriotism resounding across the land, and Anne-Marie was proud to be one of the partisans who’d rallied to the call.

She’d been careful to keep her grandfather in the dark about her activities with the local Résistance. What he didn’t know, after all, wouldn’t hurt him. But by agreeing to serve just this once as a
passeur
—one of the people who moved downed Allied pilots and Jewish refugees across occupied territories to safety—she had put him in jeopardy as well.

Still, she had decided it was a risk worth taking. Because if she’d known then what she knew now, she might have been able to help Miriam Blum.

Anne-Marie crossed herself again and said a silent “Amen.”  Outside, that bright bomber’s moon shone down upon a village where all but one slept under a patchwork quilt of snow. Inside, Henriette’s soft, steady snores and their grandfather’s louder ones echoing from across the hall told her that her prayers had been answered.

* * * *

“Ssh!”

“What’s the matter?”

Shivering as much from nerves as from the bitter cold, Anne-Marie turned to the wounded RAF pilot crouching in the ditch beside her. After checking to be sure that both Henriette and her grandfather were sound asleep, she’d sneaked down the stairs and out the door of the house. Her “lodger,” whom she’d alerted when she slipped into the garage while gathering wood for tomorrow’s fire, had been lying in wait in the loft above her grandfather’s coupe.