Claudette kissed the neighbor’s cheeks and rushed back to the cart. As the farmer helped her heave her body up, a sharp pain shot across her lower back. She groaned and bent over.
The farmer looked toward the setting sun. “I won’t be out in the dark on a road overrun by robbers. Where shall I drop you off?”
The château’s gates were surely locked at this hour. The neighbor had said that the priest had taken the children.
The area around the church was quiet, deserted, and mostly in ruins, like a ghost village. The damp charred-wood smell hung in the air. In one of the few houses still standing, a dim light glowed in a window. The barking of a dog broke the silence, triggering other dogs. Panting in panic, one hand pressed against her cramped back, Claudette lifted and dropped the iron knocker on the church’s door.
An unfamiliar young man in a black cassock opened a wicket door set in one of the large wooden double doors. Claudette couldn’t make herself coherent as she tried to explain through her crying that she was searching for her son. She knew she looked like a madwoman, bent over, her hair disheveled, and her clothes wrinkled from days of traveling.
“Come in, mademoiselle, and tell me everything,” the young priest said.
“Where is Father Sauveterre?”
“Unfortunately, the Lord called him. I am Father Hugo. What’s your name?”
“Claudette Pelletier.” Breathing hard, she raised her eyes to him. His cheeks were round and his jaw still tight, but he was balding prematurely. “Do you have a record of the town children who were dispersed during the Nazi invasion?”
“We’ll see what we can find.”
She grabbed the doorframe, hoisted herself over the step, then followed him unsteadily through the church. She averted her eyes from the tortured Christ and His suffering mother. The holy space spun. She clutched the back of a bench as weakness overtook her. At her last stop, in her frenzied attempt to hire a cart, she had not wasted time hunting for food.
“Come this way.” Father Hugo changed directions and entered a room with a long table in the center. Half a dozen people were eating. The homey smell of vegetable stew was in the air. “Have some nourishment first,” he said.
“My baby—” she began, then swooned and dropped onto the edge of a bench. The knife-sharp pain in her back was like the agony of childbirth.
After a quick glance at her, the people at the table resumed eating. A kerchiefed woman smiled at Claudette and began to fill a bowl. Claudette dropped her head into her hands and reminded herself that she had to regain her strength for Benjamin.
The root vegetable soup with chunks of rabbit meat was the first warm meal she had had in three days. She soaked up the last of the broth with bread and sipped the red wine from the decanter passed around, hoping it would ease her back pain. When she pushed herself away from the table, she couldn’t straighten. For the first time since receiving the Paris-made brace, she wished she had her old cane.
Father Hugo, supporting her by the arm, guided her to his office. “Here, sit comfortably and tell me what happened to your baby.” He perched on top of his desk, facing her.
“He’s gone.” Claudette choked out the words. “Benjamin-Pierre Baume. He has a blue tattoo on the bottom of his right foot,” she added.
“How were you two separated?”
She told him her saga.
Of course he had heard of the duchess. He raised his eyebrows. “She’s not coming back? The livelihood of so many families depends on the château,” he said. “I arrived here last fall, and I have been trying since then to take care of my flock. These people have gone through loss, fear, illnesses, starvation. Lifelong friendships and blood ties have been ruptured beyond repair by betrayals. Collaborators tried to get along with the Nazis, and collaborationists actually worked for the Nazis, spying and snitching on their own people. Who could anyone trust? Luckily, we have the Lord on whose everlasting care we can rely.” Father Hugo walked to a filing cabinet and took out a folder. “Nine children were brought in on November twelfth, 1942.” His finger ran down a list. “There’s no Benjamin-Pierre Baume. There’s a Benjamin-Pierre Pelletier. Like your name? Six weeks old.”
“That’s the one!”
“Born out of wedlock?”
Heat flooding her face, she nodded.
“Father Sauveterre’s housekeeper cared for the children until June 1944.”
Benjamin had been around one and a half then. Did that woman kiss his tears, hug him, tell him bedtime stories? “Then what?”
Father Hugo gave Claudette a strange look. “Don’t you know what happened here?”
“The war intensified when the Allies invaded Normandy.” Irrationally, from a distance, she had imagined that the battles raging all over the country were a matter for grown-ups only. “But where is Benjamin now?”
Father Hugo spoke slowly and loudly, as if she were hard of hearing. “German Waffen-SS troops plowed northwest, murdering our people. Have you heard of the massacres at Oradour-sur-Glane and Tulle? What about Maillé?”
“Of course.” Claudette hung her head, recalling the horror of the reports she heard on her Barcelona landlady’s radio. In retaliation for an attack on German soldiers and as a warning to the Maquis fighters against further acts of resistance, hundreds of innocent people had been gathered in village squares and executed in cold blood. “Those villages were far from here,” she said meekly. “Where is my son now?”
“Far from here? The Nazis were advancing toward this region! People were fleeing, not knowing which direction was safest. I was still serving in Amboise, and the mayhem there was the same. In the midst of that, Father Sauveterre was on his deathbed. His housekeeper, with no one to help, had to protect not just one orphaned child but nine.”
“Benjamin wasn’t an orphan!” Claudette cried.
“Of course not. I can see that,” Father Hugo said softly. He consulted the pages in the folder, then looked up at her. “You mentioned a tattoo?”
She lowered her gaze. “Yes,” she mumbled.
“Of a Jewish star?” he asked, his voice low, compassionate.
“His father is Jewish.” She sniffled. “I expect him to come back.”
“No Jew has returned,” Father Hugo whispered. “They were all, we presume, killed.”
Not Raphaël. He knew how to protect himself. “So where is my Benjamin?”
Father Hugo leafed through the folder again. “Of the nine children, the two oldest were placed on farms. Four, including one of your friend Léonie Doisneau’s children, were sent to a state orphanage. The three youngest were adopted.”
“Adopted? By whom? Who gave permission when everyone knew I was alive?”
He pulled out a sheet of paper. “Here’s a letter written by Monsieur Vincent Voclain—I assume you know him from Château de Valençay—ending his guardianship. That was required in order to release a child for adoption.”
