The third night Raphaël spent in her bed, with only the moon slanting pearly light on his face, he revealed more about his flight with his father.
“My first mistake was following the ordinance to register with the local precinct as a Jew. I gave my father’s Polish place of birth. It condemned us all, starting with my sister.” Raphaël’s voice broke. “Then I agreed to print Résistance leaflets for a customer. When he was arrested, I knew he wouldn’t tolerate the torture and would give my name.”
Raphaël and his father made their escape at dawn, leaving everything behind. Isaac Baume had long since stopped traveling and had sold his horse, cart, and merchandise. Fleeing, they took only a satchel each with whatever food they had on hand. They even discarded their blankets, since they were pretending to be regular Frenchmen riding to their factory shift.
Raphaël could ride a bicycle? Claudette had never considered it possible. “Didn’t you have non-Jewish friends to hide you?” she asked.
“I couldn’t ask anyone to risk the lives of their entire family.”
She took it as a compliment that Isaac Baume had trusted her. She put her arms around Raphaël as he told her about being on the run for over a year, living off the kindness of strangers. “My late mother’s jewelry paid for shelter at a farm, but then the underground bombed a bridge nearby, and the Nazis were searching for the culprits.” A shudder ran through his body. “We fled and hid in a forest.”
She couldn’t imagine living out in the open, no shelter or food. The refugees who had flooded the roads in 1940 and raided Mémère’s garden had lived in makeshift tents, but that was in summer weather. This was winter, and a particularly harsh one. There was hardly any coal to heat the château’s vast chambers, which were almost impossible to keep warm even when fuel was available. The chopped wood that Marguerite brought up each day for Claudette’s fireplace lasted only a few hours.
He continued. “In the fall, we lived in a monastery. We helped by fixing things and working in the gardens. Unfortunately, the nearby village was Protestant.” Raphaël paused. “Protestants are helping Jews, but not when they can use them to get revenge against the Catholics, and the same is true for the Catholics. Both will snitch to the Nazis in the hope of harming their religious enemies.”
“The Catholics would do no such thing.”
“Not all of them, but yes, each faction will often betray the Jews that the other is hiding.”
Two nights later, the chugging of a few airplanes wrested Claudette from sleep. She had figured out that they chose dark skies, nights of no more than a half-moon. However, tonight the full moon’s light poured into her chamber. Raphaël was sitting up in bed.
She went to the window, and he joined her, his arm around her waist as they peered out. She wanted to give herself to this simple gesture of fondness and possession, but her attention was caught by giant mushrooms swaying down from the sky.
“Parachutes,” he said.
Claudette had seen them in newsreels on the two occasions when the duchess sent the live-in staff to the village cinema. The grainy moving pictures were now real as, one by one, the slow-moving mushrooms reached the ground. Claudette’s hands flew to her throat. “My God,” she murmured, her heart beating hard. “The Nazis are landing here!”
“Not Nazis. Marshal Pétain makes the airports available to them. It’s the Résistance in action, and its cell is active inside this château. Your duchess is cooperating with the organization, if not running it.”
Claudette gasped. She had noticed large maps in the duchess’s chamber but assumed they had to do with managing the estate.
She sank into a chair and began brushing her hair. The rhythm of the brush’s strokes was the only steady thing in this large, ominous world that was pressing down on her.
Raphaël passed his hand through the hair cascading down her back. “Do you know if any paintings from the Louvre are hidden here?”
She shook her head.
“I printed a newsletter that had an article about the Nazis’ impounding hundreds of paintings from the Louvre and shipping them to Berlin. One train car was opened at a stop along the way, the paintings removed, and the car sealed again. The Nazis only discovered it when the train arrived in Berlin.”
She looked up at Raphaël’s handsome face and waited for him to explain further.
“The article suggested that the paintings had been loaded onto a train heading to the Loire Valley and then hidden in a château.”
“There are dozens of châteaux here,” she said.
“Mostly farther west. This château is between the occupied and free zones. Its location makes it a likely stop. That’s the same reason the paratroopers are landing here.” Raphaël motioned toward the field outside. “The Nazis must suspect that there is a lot of activity in Valençay, and they would like to uncover it.”
A shiver ran through Claudette. The war was catching up to her. The day before, at the midday meal, Silvain Auguste had translated an article from a smuggled British newspaper. It reported that the Nazis, disenchanted with France’s puppet president Pétain, ignored him altogether and had begun to break the treaties they had made with him.
“The Nazis will arrive in the Loire Valley,” Silvain Auguste had finished.
Raphaël knelt by Claudette’s chair and buried his face in her midsection. His voice came out broken: “There’s no telling who else saw the parachutes. My father and I must move on.”
Claudette’s breath caught in her throat. Terror and relief vied with each other. Her new love was smashed to pieces. “Where will you go?”
“I don’t know. Our staying here is also too risky for you.”
Her romance books said that hearts could break, but she’d never fully believed that. Now she felt hers cracking in pain—for herself and for the two men running for their lives. She grabbed his hands. “Can I come with you?” To be with him, she’d sleep in a cowshed, walk in the rain, live in the forest.
“Of course not.” He hugged her, nuzzling her neck. “Please don’t cry. I’ll return for you after the war.”
“You’ve taken a great risk,” Isaac Baume said to her a few hours later when she delivered their morning coffee. “There aren’t enough words to thank you. It’s the respite we needed.”
“I can’t thank you enough for all you did for me when I was young and for Mémère.” Sobbing, she withdrew her string purse from her skirt pocket. She had not spent the bills that her squatter had thrown at her, and she hadn’t touched the salary she’d earned here. The money she handed Isaac Baume was half her savings. It might buy him and Raphaël shelter somewhere for the rest of the winter.
Isaac Baume protested, but his tone was unconvincing. She already regretted leaving the other half tucked under a loose wall panel.
The grief hollowed out her chest. Her tears flowed on and off all day. Madame Couture, who had speculated that Claudette was having an affair with one of the groundskeepers, asked whether the man had mistreated her. Claudette shook her head, to which the seamstress offered the only balm she knew: “It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
Claudette’s love for Raphaël was worth everything, even sinning. She wiped her cheeks and said nothing.
At one o’clock, Claudette entered the kitchen, headed to the stove, and whispered to Lisette, “They want to leave.”
“Ten o’clock tonight, outside,” Lisette whispered back.
Instead of eating, Claudette rushed to the church on the main floor and prayed for herself, for the Baumes, and for Free France. Communists, Maquis, Gaullists, or Pétainists—she was on the side of whoever would bring an end to the war.
