Tangled Ashes (29 page)

Behind Fallon, firemen aimed powerful hoses through the broken windows of the first floor. The guests stood on the terrace overlooking the front of the castle’s grounds, watching the flames gutting the old building. In the center of the crowd, her red dress glowing in the reflected light of the flames, was Sylvia, a hand over her heart. Eva pressed up against her legs, crying, and Philippe stood stoically at her side, Jade’s protective hands on his shoulders. If Fallon had wanted a memorable evening, he’d certainly succeeded in that.

“Everything’s fine,” Becker told the British man who stood disheveled and untucked beside him. There were smudges of soot on his clothes and face. He pointed his chin toward Thérèse. “Jojo got her out.”

Just then, a large portion of the second floor of the stables caved in, sending a spray of sparks and flaming debris cascading out through the windows and down onto the trees. Becker and Fallon stumbled back, along with the firefighters who had been standing at the entrance, planning their strategy.

“All okay?” one of them yelled.

“All okay!” a couple of the men answered. They pulled back a little, adjusted their aim, and began to pour water through the two largest windows above the stairs. A second truck came to a halt behind the first, extending its hydraulic ladder and beginning to douse the smoking roof of the stables.

“I’m really sorry, Mr. Fallon,” Becker said. “I don’t know how this—”

“We’re all safe,” Fallon interrupted, laying a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “That’s all that matters right now. We’ll deal with the rest in the morning.” He gave Becker’s shoulder a warm squeeze, then turned and stepped toward the lilac trees, where Thérèse still lay, two paramedics at her side.

The hair on the right side of her head had been partially burned away, leaving raw, blistering skin. Jojo stood not far from her, his attention on the words and actions of the paramedics caring for Thérèse. They used a gauze pad to gently remove some of the singed hair that clung to the burned skin above her temple, seeking to evaluate her injuries, and exposed a small, heart-shaped birthmark that had until then been hidden by her hair. Jojo stepped forward, and his legs seemed to buckle for just a moment.

Fallon walked to where Jojo stood and extended his hand. “Thank you, Jojo,” he said. “I don’t know how you did it, but . . . thank you.”

“You in charge here?” one of the paramedics asked.

“Yes, I am. How can I help?”

“We need to take her to the Chantilly hospital. Are there any relatives you can call?”

Fallon looked back at Becker. “Anyone you know?”

Becker hunched his shoulders. He’d never even considered a life for Thérèse outside of the château project. He was sobered by the realization.

Fallon finalized arrangements with the paramedics and saw Thérèse safely into the ambulance. Jojo never took his eyes off her. A muscle clenched in his jaw, and there was a softness in his eyes that Becker hadn’t seen before.

“You saved her life,” Becker said as the ambulance drove out through the gates. He smirked in spite of the dire circumstances. “You realize Philippe is never going to let you out of his sight again. You’re a real-life hero now.”

Jojo shook his head, a gleam of tears in his eyes. “I am no hero.”

“You risked your life getting her out of there. That’s more than most people would do.”

The older man shook his head again. “It’s what any father would do.”

For a moment, Becker wondered if he’d misunderstood. The man’s French was as rugged as his skin—harsh and clipped, the
r
’s too pronounced and the consonants too strong. Becker looked more closely into the old man’s eyes, their expression nearly obscured by the starless night. Jojo tried to smile, though the contortion looked painful and awkward on his age-ravaged face. His steel-gray stare was as honest as anything Becker had seen before.

AUGUST 1944

T
HE CASTLE BRISTLED
with activity and tension. When their driver opened the back doors of the truck, Elise and Marie were shaken from the ride and still braced against the tall walls of boxes. It had only taken a few minutes for them to get from the manor to the château, but those minutes had been interminable for Elise. Her face was ashen, her hair matted with sweat, and her eyes frantic.

“Find Karl,” she wailed as soon as the doors were opened. “Find my Karl.”

Marie hopped down from the truck and tried to pull her friend to her feet. “First, we get you inside. Then I’ll find Karl.”

Elise shook her head, a bit of hysteria in the motion, and pulled back, holding her stomach as if determination alone would keep the baby from being born. “No!” she yelled, the veins in her neck protruding. “No! Find Karl! I’m not having this baby until you find him!”

Marie was about to launch into a speech about how the drivers needed to unload the truck when Frau Heinz pushed her aside. “She’s in labor?” she asked, one hand mechanically going to Elise’s wrist to check her pulse while the other settled on her stomach, feeling for contractions. The head nurse’s firm, no-nonsense attention seemed to calm Elise’s panic.

“Her water broke around three,” Marie explained, nearly reduced to tears by the relief of having someone else taking over Elise’s care. “I’m not—I’m not sure how far along she is. We had to hide in the truck to get here—Kommandant Koch didn’t want her transported with the other mothers. . . .”

Frau Heinz’s eyebrows drew together in disapproval, but she didn’t verbalize her feelings. “Contractions?”

“Every few minutes, I think.”

The large German woman walked around the side of the truck and found the drivers leaning against it, lighting cigarettes. “You,” she said, pointing. “Get up to the second floor. We’ve set up the infirmary in the room just to the right of the landing. Get a gurney and come back down. We need to get this girl out of your truck and into the castle.”

One of the drivers took the cigarette from his lips and pointed at Frau Heinz with it. “This is not—”

“Go!” she said so loudly and so authoritatively that the two men jumped, then scurried up the steps to the castle.

Within minutes, Elise had been carried up the curving staircase and installed in a bed in a large room that had been converted into a haphazard medical space. Boxes of instruments lined the walls, and a delivery table stood near the middle of the room. Frau Heinz examined Elise, her eyes darting over her shoulder to make contact with Marie’s. “Your baby is presenting sideways,” she finally told the young mother. “Now, you’re still at the beginning of your labor, so there’s a chance it will turn on its own, but we’ll need to keep an eye on it.” She turned to Marie. “Help your friend into one of the gowns in that box over there, young lady. You got her here—you might as well make yourself useful.”

Elise had been relatively calm as she’d been carried up the stairs and installed in the room, but as soon as Frau Heinz mentioned her baby’s difficult position, she went from quietly frightened to panic-stricken again. “It’s sideways?” she asked as Marie tried to help her out of her clothes. She grabbed her friend’s hands and pulled her down, whispering harshly. “Marie . . . Marie, I can’t do this. I need Karl. I can’t have this baby without Karl!”

Marie sat on the edge of Elise’s bed, prepared to soothe her, but Frau Heinz stepped in before she could. “Listen to me, young lady,” she said to Elise. “Whether you like it or not, this baby is coming out. It might turn on its own or we might have to turn it ourselves, but you’re giving birth either way. Now I realize that these aren’t ideal circumstances, but they’re what you’ve got.”

“But Karl . . .”

The whining exasperated the nurse. “Your Karl,” she said firmly, “is out there somewhere preparing for whatever the next day or so is going to bring. He’s a soldier, not a nursemaid, and his place is with the rest of the men trying to secure this castle. Understood?”

Elise shook her head and released a low moan that grew into sobs. There was so much abject despair on her face that the stern nurse realized there’d be no calming her. With a disapproving grunt, she turned her back on her patient and focused on setting up the delivery table.

Marie stroked her arm, leaning in close to whisper, “Just breathe, Elise. Just breathe.” But Elise could not be comforted. The pain of labor and the difficulty of the impending birth had combined into a toxic jumble in her mind, and what little grip she had on reality continued to fritter away as the afternoon wore on.

“Please don’t take my baby,” she begged, her contractions neither speeding up nor slowing but intensifying with each passing minute. “Please don’t take it away.”

“Nobody’s taking your baby,” Marie said again and again, lowering her voice to a soothing pitch.

Frau Heinz was called away to deal with the urgent business of preparing the castle for whatever lay ahead. She recruited a young nurse to watch over Elise, leaving her with firm instructions to check the baby’s position every hour and inform her if anything changed. “If the child or the mother are in distress or if the baby hasn’t turned within the next handful of hours, find me,” she said. “Unless I hear from you, I’ll assume things are progressing normally.”

Though the head nurse’s interactions with Elise had been firm, they’d held an undertone of sympathy. That was not the case with Nurse Grüber, who replaced her during the afternoon and evening of Elise’s labor. Whatever attention she paid to the pain-wracked girl was reluctant, and she spent more time outside the delivery room than inside.

Marie continued to stroke her friend’s arm and assure her that everything was going to be all right, but she lived in private dread that Kommandant Koch would arrive at the château, track them down, and put them out on the street. As Elise’s labor intensified, however, there was little more she could think of than the agony her friend was enduring. Elise rocked her bent legs back and forth, gripping her stomach, her head thrown back, alternately moaning and screaming with the pain of contractions. Marie wiped her brow with a cool cloth and gave her sips of water, but she was powerless to do more to ease her suffering.

“Don’t let them take my baby,” Elise said again, after the sky outside the tower window had darkened into night. She gripped Marie’s hand with both of hers, sweat beading on her forehead, a pain- and exhaustion-fueled dementia tightening her features and widening her eyes. “Don’t let them take it! Promise me! Promise me, Marie!”

Marie made shushing sounds, but they didn’t calm her friend. Elise arched her back as another contraction gripped her, her voice broken as she screamed, “They’re going to steal my baby! They’re going to steal my baby!” Her eyes clung to Marie’s. “You won’t let them, will you? Please? Please, Marie, tell me you won’t let them!”

“Elise,” Marie soothed, “first, you need to have this baby. We’ll figure out what happens to it afterward, okay? Concentrate on bringing it into the world first.”

Elise shook her head with such vigor against the pillow that her hair fell over her face. “I’m not going to be there,” she said. “I’m dying. I know I’m dying!”

Marie gripped her friend’s shoulders, as she’d done so many times before, and gave them a firm squeeze. “No, you are not!” she said, enunciating each word clearly. “You’re in a lot of pain—I understand that—but you are not dying.”

Elise continued to shake her head against the pillow, eyes closed, repeating unintelligible pleas over and over.

It was just past midnight when Marie realized that the nurse hadn’t been in to check on Elise in a couple of hours. Her friend’s agony had increased to an unbearable level. She looked ashen, her face swollen, her eyes wide and terrified, her lips slowly turning a frightening shade of blue. After several hours of mumbled moaning and a lethargic submission to the pain wracking her body, she seemed to regroup for just a moment. She grasped Marie’s hand with her last shreds of strength and sucked air into her constricted lungs. Staring at her friend with wrenching clarity, she half screamed, half groaned, “It hurts. It hurts, Marie! Please—make it stop!” Then she slid into unconsciousness, her body seeming to sink into the mattress as her tense muscles unclenched.

Marie laid a hand on her forehead, then felt for a pulse. Her skin was cold and clammy, her pulse fast and weak. She’d never seen a birth before and had no idea whether Elise’s unconsciousness was something to be worried about, but she had a feeling in her gut that she should get some help. Marie went out into the darkened hallway hoping to find a nurse, but it was deserted. Increasingly eager to have her friend examined, she crept down the stairs toward the sound of voices rising from the large room to the west of the entryway. She approached it quietly, her ears trained on Generalmajor Müller’s voice.

“Our best estimates have them arriving in Lamorlaye in four days. That’s if they don’t drop parachutists on the town before then. We’ve received instructions to hold our position at least until tomorrow evening. After that, we’ll either brace for battle or evacuate east.” His voice was weary, though he tried to mask it with clipped words and an authoritative tone.

Marie peered into the room, trying to remain mostly out of sight, and saw that it was filled with soldiers of the Wehrmacht, Frau Heinz, Kommandant Koch, and the German personnel who had, until that day, run the château and the manor. There was a deep feeling of apprehension in the room that she’d never witnessed before, not in all the months she’d worked at the manor. Though these soldiers were putting on a brave face, it was obvious that they knew the immediate future would not be clement.

Marie scanned the crowd and thought she saw Karl sitting two rows from the back. She longed to take him upstairs to Elise, but there was no way of getting his attention without drawing some to herself. What she needed more was for the young nurse to resume her duties, but there was no sign of her among those assembled for the briefing. She retraced her steps and skirted the staircase, wandering noiselessly over marble floors as she followed the sound of voices coming from the other end of the castle.

The dining rooms were dark, and though Marie was spooked, she wasn’t swayed from her mission. She eventually made it to the brightly lit kitchen and found the nurse and two maids gathered around a wooden table in its center, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and playing a card game. Marie entered the kitchen with a confidence born of anger and stared pointedly at the nurse who had been caring for Elise for most of the afternoon. “My friend’s been in labor for ten hours and is passed out from exhaustion, and you’re down here playing cards?” she asked, the angry edge to her voice unmistakable in the sudden silence. “We need you upstairs,” she said, adding a firm “now” for emphasis.

The nurse straightened in her chair and raised her chin in defiance. “Go back to your slut friend and leave me alone,” she sneered. “I’m not wasting my time on a stable boy’s baby.”

Marie felt fury burning through her veins, but before she could retort, Frau Heinz’s voice lashed through the kitchen with cold precision. “Go upstairs!” she ordered, her tone razor sharp.

The young nurse flashed Marie a contemptuous smile. “Yeah, go back up to your slut friend and—”

“I was speaking to you, Fräulein Grüber,” Frau Heinz said, taking a step into the room and aiming a glare that held disgust and command at the nurse. “Get back to your duties before I inform the Kommandant of your reckless neglect of the Führer’s child! Move!”

The nurse got up so quickly that her chair fell backward. She didn’t pause to straighten it but rushed out of the kitchen, red-faced and humiliated, taking the back stairs quickly on her way to the second floor. Marie left too as Frau Heinz’s voice rose in a diatribe against the maids still in the kitchen. She followed the young nurse down the long, darkened second-floor corridor and stopped only when she’d reached her friend’s room. The nurse, still smarting from the dressing-down, went promptly to Elise’s bed and felt for her pulse. She shifted her fingers on the young mother’s wrist, eyes vacant. Pulling back the sheets, she examined Elise’s belly, pressing here and there. Marie saw her jaw clench as she pulled the sheet back up and used her knuckles to apply pressure to Elise’s sternum, trying to wake her. “Elise!” she said so loudly that she startled Marie. “Elise!” she repeated, applying more pressure to the patient’s chest and checking her eyes with her other hand.

“How long has she been like this?” the nurse finally asked, lifting Elise’s fingers and noting their purplish color. “How long?” she repeated more harshly.

“I . . . I don’t know! A few minutes, maybe. She’s been bad for hours—hours! But Frau Heinz said you’d let her know if anything was wrong, so—”

“Go get her,” Nurse Grüber ordered, though it seemed a reluctant command. “Get her now!”

Marie felt the breath whoosh out of her lungs. She didn’t ask any questions. The look on the nurse’s face was enough to send her careening down the corridor again, her pulse loud in her ears, her legs unsteady. She found Frau Heinz coming up the back stairs and stammered, “Please come. P—please!” Though the older woman was far from lithe, she moved with surprising speed, covering the distance between the stairs and the birthing room rapidly. As soon as she entered, she was pulling on gloves and barking questions at the nurse. “What’s her status?”