November 1942
The employees who lived in town, like Madame Couture and Marguerite, no longer showed up to work. Any minute, Nazi tanks might roll in or their bombs might drop from the air. The risk of being outside was too great.
Claudette perspired even in the damp chill of the grand rooms. Since returning to her job three weeks earlier, she had been working feverishly to help hide the duke’s ancestral treasures. She cut up flannel liners from garments and sewed them into dozens of pouches for silver pieces. They would be buried in the park, where no air would tarnish them.
Fear coursed through her veins. The enemy was closing in. Among the skeleton staff, she would be singled out by the Nazis as the invalide. What would happen to her baby, away from her in the village?
She recalled the shock two and a half years earlier when the Maginot Line had collapsed. Now, blocked by the Allies’ counterattacks in North Africa, Nazis were advancing into the free zone. Despite de Gaulle’s daily broadcast from London encouraging the thousands of brave spirits to free France from its conquerors, and despite Silvain Auguste’s grand talk about the underground preparing to meet the enemy, Claudette had heard of no French army, definitely not one strong enough to deter Nazi tanks.
“Hurry up, before the Boche take the job off your hands,” Monsieur Vincent told Claudette and the few remaining maids. All she wanted was to hold Benjamin and press him to her breast—except that what little milk she had been able to produce had dried up. Only Léonie could feed him. Claudette’s arms ached with his absence.
In spite of the cloud of doom, the duchess held her back erect and kept her voice gentle yet commanding as she supervised the staff’s work. Paintings were taken down from the walls. Hundreds of fine cloisonné jars and porcelain trinkets were carefully wrapped and hidden in the basement behind a false wall. Crystal chandeliers were hung inside wooden crates along with antique furniture in the wine cellars. Claudette packed the ancient uniforms, swords, and medals—the paraphernalia of aristocracy—for the duchess’s son and his future offspring because, the duchess said, gentility stood firm against shifting political winds.
Only the monumental sculptures from the Louvre remained visible. Claudette passed these marble Greek goddesses in the gallery when she went to her tower room to wash. When would the Nazis come to haul them away—and find her?
Monsieur Vincent ran the staff through air-raid drills. At night, they slept on mattresses in the wide passage parallel to the kitchen. Some nights, just before dawn, a group of men smelling of sweat and gunpowder entered the kitchen, fell hungrily on the cauldron of soup, and dropped to the floor to catch some sleep.
Then it happened. A devastated maid from the nearby Château de Chenonceau bicycled to the estate with the news that men in armored vehicles had taken over the château. The medieval building spanned the Cher River, which had been designated as the demarcation line between the free and occupied zones. The Nazis suspected that Chenonceau operated as a transfer bridge for fugitives and art. Hiccupping, the hysterical maid reported that when the estate manager denied the accusation, the Nazis shot him in front of the staff.
Next, the Nazis plundered Château des Bouffards. Midmorning, Claudette and the others gathered around the radio to hear the transmission by the BBC: “Dozens of German trucks were filled with every stick of furniture, every painting, every piece of china and silver; even silk and brocade curtains were confiscated.” Claudette wanted to put her hands over her ears, to block it all, but she couldn’t stop listening. “First the Nazis emptied all the cellars of France’s great wines and champagne. Now they’re emptying France of all its art treasures and transporting them to Germany,” the reporter continued.
The staff debated whether the brutal Boche would bomb Valençay into a pile of rubble or spare it because of the Louvre sculptures they wished to loot.
But no one doubted that they would come.
The duchess’s maid had escaped, supposedly heading somewhere west with her mother, but the talk was that in fact she had run east with a German officer. Claudette was left to see to the duchess’s needs. Her dream was realized, but it was no longer what she wanted. All she could think of was Benjamin.
“The Boche are not interested in infants. Your baby is in good hands with Léonie,” Monsieur Vincent told Claudette when he came upon her crying.
What did this aging man know about the feel of Benjamin’s tiny, warm body against her chest, his warm skin next to hers?
Léonie had rented out Claudette’s former room to a Parisian couple, both university professors, and their twelve-year-old daughter, Emmaline. When Claudette visited for a day and a half each week, she slept in the front room. If the day wasn’t too cold, she took Benjamin outside to be alone with him. She told him about her week, and his wise eyes—their greenish hue like Raphaël’s—followed her lips when she spoke. When she departed, Emmaline cradled him in her arms and sang to him, which gave Claudette some comfort.
The morning Claudette heard of an air bombing of the village of Vendôme, she could take the separation from Benjamin no more. The attack had left many dead and injured, the surrounding houses and farms flattened, and the Vendôme château barely spared from ruin. Keeping her job was no longer an option. Claudette approached the duchess in her sitting room.
The green silk that covered every inch of the walls showed the unfaded areas where paintings had been removed. The wood floors were discolored in places where furniture had once stood.
Her voice trembling, Claudette said, “Madame la Duchesse, I’m so sorry to let you down, but I must go to my baby.”
“Such a difficult time for all of us. I wish that I could protect Mathéo, send him away.” The duchess sighed. “Monsieur Vincent will pay you the balance of your wages for the month. Ask him whom he can spare to drive you.”
“Thank you, madame. I’ll never forget your kindness.”
“God be with you, dear Claudette. God be with all of us.”
Claudette rushed to her room and gathered clothes, toiletries, and Mémère’s sewing kit. She removed her money from behind the wood panel and tucked it into her brassiere and vest pockets. There was no question of lugging Mémère’s heavy trunk; she could take only a large canvas bag. Dragging it on the floor, she made her way toward the business manager’s office.
She emerged from the side corridor to mayhem. Marguerite, who hadn’t come in for weeks, screamed in horror. The staff gathered around her.
“My sister.” Marguerite hiccupped the words. “The Nazis!”
Claudette broke into the circle and put her arm around her friend. “What?”
“They’re combing through the houses.” The maid gathered herself. “They found Jewish refugees next door and dragged them out and beat them. They ordered us all to stand outside as they searched our homes too. When my sister couldn’t move, they just shot her in bed!”
A black cloud filled Claudette’s head. Her tongue thickened in her mouth. No one would drive her to the village now. The Nazis had finally come for people like her. To shoot them.
She had to live for Benjamin.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Uzi Yarden
Loire Valley, France
September 1946
Disheveled and dispirited people dragging cloth bundles and cardboard suitcases filled the stations. When a train arrived, they jostled for spots in the cars, ignoring the unshaven, wounded soldiers wearing tattered, bloodstained uniforms. Uzi changed trains three times and rode standing in a crowded bus on the last leg of his trip. The bombed railway to Châteauroux hadn’t been repaired.
The town looked like a picture postcard. Green forest surrounded the château rising on the opposite bank of the fast-flowing river that could have irrigated the entire land of Israel. Using Miriam’s directions, Uzi made his way down a cobblestoned street the width of a horse-drawn cart. A narrow channel carved in its center carried wastewater.
“Your first stop will be a Protestant house of worship. Its religious leader is called a pastor,” Miriam had said. “Don’t confuse him with a Catholic one, called a priest.”
Uzi had no knowledge of the differences between the Christian denominations, only that they disapproved of one another. Then he saw their churches. A magnificent, sky-high cathedral dominated a wide street and drew the eye heavenward with its spires, steeples, and stained-glass windows. That street intersected with the main thoroughfare and narrowed to an alley only partially paved. There, still in sight of the cathedral, stood a humble, whitewashed, rectangular one-story building with a pitched roof. A marked difference, though both religions claimed to be monotheistic. How did that work with worshipping Jesus and a host of saints? Not that Uzi cared. He didn’t believe in a divine entity, only in people and their innate strength. Not in all people, for sure, only the good ones, those who treated their fellow humans with decency, dignity, and kindness.
A sculpted open book mounted on the pediment above the door was the only decoration. Uzi pulled the string of a doorbell. Climbing vines in riotous autumn reds covered the wall of an adjacent garden.
“Welcome to the Land of a Thousand Châteaux,” Pastor Gaspard said in English when he opened the door.
