She repaired the tear and ordered herself to be more careful, although only an hour later, she singed a ribbon she was pressing.
“You act like a woman in love,” Madame Couture said.
Was it love? Claudette told herself that it was no more than a village girl’s infatuation. And yet, years before she met him, the thought of him had taken root in her. With his hobbled leg, he was a kindred spirit. He knew the frustration of an unruly limb. Now that she had seen Raphaël and heard his voice, she couldn’t get him out of her mind. In the fabric she was holding, she saw the reflected glow of the candlelight in his green eyes. As the hours passed, the accidental graze of their fingers grew into a fantasy of his hand traveling up her sleeve to her cheek . . . The vision of his tall, thin figure hovering at the top of the steps that morning churned her insides with the sweetest sensations. His earnest thanks ignited her nerve endings—
Madame Couture’s giggle landed Claudette back on earth with an almost audible thud. Embarrassed, Claudette bent over her embroidery. Yes, in the romance tales, love did happen just like that. A coup de foudre, they called it, a “strike of lightning,” and it was so true. It was described as delicious torment, which was true too.
Claudette looked out at the cold, colorless fields and, beyond them, the Nahon River, its gray surface mirroring the overcast skies. In the quiet of the atelier, with only the sound of the burning wood crackling—the warmth kept Claudette’s fingers supple—her worries mounted. What would Lisette do when she discovered that the people who had been sent over weren’t brave Résistance members but hunted Jews? Would she confess to Monsieur Vincent, who would report the men to the préfet?
Marguerite’s envy presented another danger. Would she explore the tower’s uninhabited rooms for her Résistance heroes until she found the hidden passage? Would she, unaware of the disastrous consequences for Claudette, demand Silvain Auguste also give her an assignment, raising his suspicions?
As Claudette was leaving the kitchen after the midday meal, Lisette gave her a towel-wrapped bundle. “This must last until morning.”
Claudette clutched the food to her chest and hurried up so she could steal time from her work. She was out of breath when she reached the hidden turret. The men, wrapped in blankets, were reading in the light that flooded the room in early afternoon. Raphaël closed his book and smiled at her. She blushed, put down the bundle, and offered to lead them down to the lavatory. In the foyer, she stood guard, beads of sweat dotting her forehead at the noises emanating from the pipes. She prayed that it wouldn’t alert someone below.
She couldn’t bring herself to tell them to leave tonight.
The men began to climb back to the turret. Raphaël turned toward her as if he wanted her to linger. How long could she keep this up? She was already exhausted by the physical demand. Yet rushing back to the atelier, she carried with her his last smile.
The sun had long since set on this short winter day when she returned to her chamber. She lit a kerosene lamp, then filled a hot-water bottle and brought it up to Isaac Baume.
“Could you tell us about your life and work here?” He was curled on his side under the blankets.
She put on her gloves and sat on the frame of a third cot. Her words formed a mist in the cold air as she told the men about the château, the late duke’s wine cellars, and the duchess, who worked hard to keep the estate producing, ran a literary salon in the library, and hosted concerts in the music room.
After a while, Isaac Baume dozed off. His deep breaths were broken occasionally by a soft whistle. Answering Raphaël’s questions, Claudette said she was refreshing the duchess’s black mourning wardrobe and, because no new lingerie was being sent from Paris, she mended her employer’s fine silk pieces.
Raphaël spoke about his work as a printer. He made Claudette laugh when he imitated his aging boss, who’d had to strain to see the pages. Isaac had helped him buy the business. As Raphaël spoke, his long fingers animated his sentences. He had liked setting the lead letters, he told her, one by one, upside down, the rows and spaces even, no mistakes. “As exact as your work,” he added with a grin. His teeth were white and straight, like those of the men in the romance novellas.
He lifted the book he had been reading. “I printed this one. Aesop’s Fables.”
She leafed through the pages. The letters and lines weren’t as small as they were in the books the duchess read, which didn’t even feature drawings. “‘The Ant and the Grasshopper,’ ‘The Crow and the Fox,’ ‘The Tortoise and the Hare,’ ‘The Fox and the Goat,’” Claudette read aloud, glad that his father had taught her to read. “These are children’s stories!”
“They seem so, right? Each is a lesson in life’s philosophy. I read one fable at a time, and it helps take my mind off everything. I think about it for hours.”
“Why are you on the run? We’re in the free zone.”
Raphaël looked at her. “The free zone is not free of old Marshal Pétain’s hatred of us. He spews anti-Semitic propaganda. He’s seizing Jewish property.”
“But what can he or his government actually do to you? Aren’t you better off in a labor camp, being fed and having a roof over your head, than you are living outside in the cold of winter?” She glanced at Isaac Baume. “What if your father gets sick?”
“The flyer, signed by Marshal Pétain himself, said that only foreign-born Jews were to be deported. Nevertheless, my sister was taken.” Raphaël clasped his hands and looked at them for a long minute. “Afterward, I printed a fake document for myself and didn’t wear the yellow star on my clothes so I could sneak to the train station, where the Jews of our town had been locked up, packed in like sardines. I went every day, hoping to find a way to rescue her. No chance. They wound barbed wire around the building, and the French police guarded them. Even from the outside, I could smell the stench. No food was ever delivered! My people literally starved inside. Then, one morning, all the children were brought out—even the babies and toddlers, who were snatched from their screaming parents’ arms—and put on buses.”
“Why?” Claudette whispered, horror filling her.
“Right. Why such inhuman cruelty? To what end?” He paused to let the image and the unanswerable questions sink in before he went on. “My sister was younger than me, but she was the smartest in the family. So kind, too, like a little mother since our mother died.”
“What happened to her? Where is she?”
“Two days later, all the adults—my sister among them—were shoved like cattle onto a freight train. The cars had no seats or windows. They were bolted boxes! No light, no air, no food, no water, no sanitation. I’m having nightmares thinking what it was like in that tomb. How many hours and days could they survive in these beastly conditions?”
“Where were they going?”
“Maybe to labor camps in Germany? Am I to believe that after such brutal accommodations—if any of them survived—they were treated like royalty?”
Claudette curled into herself. “Why the children? What labor could they expect from infants?” Not unlike the useless invalides.
“Something is so terribly wrong, it’s unfathomable. We Jews of France are no longer certain who is our worst enemy. That’s why my father and I must stay on the outside: to figure it out.”
In spite of the horrors Raphaël was describing, she adored listening to his voice. So masculine; no romance booklet could explain the effect it had on her. “The Boche are monsters,” she said.
“Boche? No! I’m telling you that this is all our French government’s doing. I saw not a single Nazi hat around, only blue French police caps.”
Claudette bit her nails. Over the years, she’d heard people say they didn’t trust Jews, starting with the priest at La Guerche, who’d called them Jesus killers. In the tavern, she had heard them spoken of with outright disgust, which was the reason she opened the back gate for Isaac Baume. Recently, she had heard the same vitriol from Monsieur Vincent and his quotes from newspapers. Yet how far could such hatred go? The Jews were the Chosen People, Mémère had said. When you met them in person, as Claudette had, you knew they were good people.
“Have they started removing the invalides too?” she whispered.
“Every time it seems impossible to imagine anything worse, it happens.”
They fell silent. Isaac Baume’s soft snores were the only sounds in the turret.
Claudette changed the subject, moving to safer ground. “In your shop, did you print romance stories?”
His laughter relieved the tension. “We had a whole storage room filled with them. When we left, I took with me only a couple of boring books.” His eyebrows rose in a mischievous expression. “Had I known I’d meet you, I would have packed some.”
She smiled, bringing her hand up to cover her broken front teeth.
“Don’t,” he said.
