Tangled Ashes (5 page)

The last place they visited was the former stables. They were
located in a long, two-story building just to the left of the château. The bottom floor boasted ceilings and doors tall enough to allow riders on horses to circulate without impediment, and the upper floor was another series of small, mostly dilapidated bedrooms. Fallon cautioned Becker to avoid walking near the orange plastic cone on the landing. “Watch your step there, lad. There’s a rotten spot in the floor. It gets worse in the east end, I’m afraid. A former owner sealed off the communicating door in the hallway to spare visitors from injury. You can see it boarded up down the hall there.”

Becker glanced down the dark hallway and saw the crisscrossing planks that had been nailed across the doorway leading to the far portion of the corridor. This was a dormitory space where jockeys had been stacked like lumber in poorly constructed cubbyholes. The garish wallpaper peeling from thin partitions further proved that little decorative effort had been invested in these rooms.

“This will be phase three of the project,” Fallon said. “If we get that far,” he quickly amended.

Beck looked around. “What do you see happening here?”

“I’m not quite sure,” the Brit admitted. “Maybe some on-site lodging for the personnel on this level? A small spa and a museum in the stable space downstairs? You’ll find that every shovelful of dirt you raise on the grounds will hold artifacts dating back a couple hundred years, so we could stock a few display cases fairly fast.”

Beck nodded. He could see the potential for a striking museum in the elegant arches and molded ceilings of the bottom floor, with smaller, more intimate rooms at the opposite end, where guests would be pampered in a high-class spa. But there were more pressing matters on Beck’s mind than massages and pedicures. “If this is phase three, what’s phase one and two?” he asked.

Fallon led him back to the stairs, skirting the plastic cone. “Phase one is getting the ground floor ready for my wife’s birthday, of course,” he said, moving down the stairs. “We’ll need the château’s
entryway, the large dining rooms, the ballroom, and the grand staircase to be finished by then. That’s April 23, by the way.”

“Not much time.”

“Your partner seemed to think you could pull it off. What’s your opinion?”

“My gut feeling? Doubtful.”

“And how often is your gut right, lad?”

Becker considered the question for a moment. “These days, not very often,” he said with utter honesty.

“All I ask is that you give it your best effort,” Fallon assured him. “Your partner made it very clear that you wouldn’t be staying longer than your contract demands. If you can finish phase one, I’ll be satisfied. And if you can lay the foundation for phase two while you’re at it—”

“Phase two?”

“Transforming the second and third floors into guest rooms and common areas. I presume you’ve seen your partner’s blueprints?”

Beck nodded.

“His drawings completely alter the floor plan without losing any of the château’s old-world charm. He’s really quite a visionary, isn’t he?”

“That’s one word for him.”

“Tearing down walls and replacing support beams are both major tasks, from what I’ve gathered. You’re going to be a very busy man.”

Beck shook his head. “You realize this is virtually impossible, right?”

“Preposterous. Exactly. But your partner, Mr. Tyler, struck me as a man who likes a challenge when I met him last year—a trait I quite fancy—and it seems to me, from our brief interaction, that it might be a trait you share with him.”

“How many extra laborers are in the budget?” Beck asked.

“I’ve already got a crew working on the plumbing and electric,”
Fallon responded. “A couple others are ready to get to work on the rest of the project as soon as you’re ready for them.”

Beck nodded his approval as they stepped out of the stables and stood looking at the château. Night had descended, and the moon cast stark shadows on the limestone walls.

“Imagine it,” Fallon said, pointing his chin toward the slumbering towers and windows. “A hotel. A spa. Tennis courts out back. Gourmet cuisine. Louis XIV furniture in all the suites. This can be a gem, my lad. And a lucrative one at that!”

They walked across the circle of grass in front of the castle and stopped when they stood dead center, facing the centuries-old building.

“There’s only one problem,” Beck said.

“What’s that?”

“My apartment. It smells like a urinal.”

Fallon let rip with a roaring laugh and smacked Beck on the back so hard that the younger man lost his balance. “Well, that can be remedied easily enough! We’ll tackle it in the morning.” He stood there chuckling, his hand patting Becker’s shoulder, his eyes soft on the castle before him. “We’re going to make this happen, lad. And it’s going to be just grand.”

JULY 1943

T
HE MANOR STOOD
on a hill high above Lamorlaye, its graceful lines and manicured lawns hidden in a thick forest of oak, beech, and chestnut trees. It had been built in 1912 by the Meunier family, but they’d had no choice but to surrender the property to Heinrich Himmler’s Waffen-SS when the Nazis had invaded Lamorlaye in 1940. The SS had begun as a small paramilitary force devoted to Hitler but had grown into a formidable symbol of Nazi power that no one dared oppose. Kommandant Erhard Koch had quickly made the manor his headquarters, a guarded estate few were permitted to see and fewer still to enter. Even the Wehrmacht cavalrymen who had made their home in Lamorlaye’s nearby castle and stables were unwelcome guests at the manor.

It wasn’t really by choice that the girls had ended up working there. Like most of the villagers, they had seen the Germans arrive in
town and had assumed they’d stay only a few weeks, maybe months. But more than two years after the Occupation had begun, they’d had to resign themselves to the fact that the Germans—the
boches
, as the French Resistance pejoratively called them—were there to stay.

It was during a Saturday-morning market that one of Koch’s men had approached the stand Marie and her mother were tending. With the war, fruits and vegetables had become scarce—eggs and meat even more so—and the once-thriving market had been reduced to a handful of farm stands from which the rich and the occupiers bought rationed food at exorbitant prices. That morning, Koch’s guard had informed the women that Kommandant Koch needed help at the manor and that he was willing to pay for the services of volunteers with food and modest salaries. Marie had signed up on the spot, and though her mother hadn’t been enthusiastic about her choice, the handouts she’d brought home had quickly quelled any misgivings. Those were lean years in Lamorlaye, and every extra loaf of bread was a rare luxury.

Two weeks later, when Koch had commanded Marie to recruit additional help, she’d asked her friend Elise to join her at the manor. The two sixteen-year-olds had spent every day since then working together. They’d commiserated over the workload and made faces behind Koch’s back on days when he’d stormed around the premises barking orders and thundering his displeasure. And they’d kept each other going on days when all they wanted to do was quit. Their hours were long and they were treated like slaves, but they knew their families counted on them to supplement the meager resources they had.

It was in early July that they sensed a change coming. It was nothing they could point to—they still spent each day cleaning, doing laundry, and meeting every need the Kommandant brought to their attention. But there was a feeling of anticipation in the manor, a lightness among the SS and their staff that was so uncharacteristic
that it worried the girls. In their experience, anything that made the
boches
happy was to be feared.

The trucks arrived on a Friday, loaded down with furniture and boxes of strange-looking instruments. Elise and Marie watched soldiers unload them under Koch’s watchful eye and carry their contents up the stairs to the second and third floors of the manor. No one mentioned the activity to them, and they knew better than to ask questions. A few days later, when they’d stayed late ironing SS uniforms for an event the next day, the girls had snuck up to the second floor and, hoping Koch and his acolytes had retired to their quarters for the night, had started opening doors.

“This is strange,” Elise said, standing just inside the first room they’d explored. Marie had suspected that the SS were turning the manor into a hotel, but the large assortment of medical equipment in that room convinced her otherwise. The girls looked around, wide-eyed. The hospital-style bed, the examination table, the surgical lights, the instruments . . .

“You think we’re going to become nurses next?” Elise asked, a nervous giggle in her words. “I mean, they’ve already made us into maids and cooks and seamstresses and gardeners. Why not nurses too, right?”

Marie stepped into the room and looked more closely at some of the instruments. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Why would they bring their wounded all the way here from the front? They’d die on the road.”

Elise shook her head. “I don’t like this. Whatever they’re doing, it’s going to mean more work for us.”

The other rooms on the floor held none of the medical equipment. They’d been exquisitely furnished with comfortable beds and plush couches and chairs, their walls adorned with expensive artwork and their floors covered with imported rugs.

“Probably all requisitioned,” Marie said, glancing around the fourth bedroom they’d entered and moving to sit in the chaise lounge
by the window. “I bet there’s a family somewhere in Chantilly wondering who stole their chair.”

Elise giggled again. “So what do you think?” she asked, plopping down on the bed and testing its springs. “Are they turning the manor into a hospital?”

“I don’t know.”

A day later, a handful of German nurses moved into the servant quarters at the back of the manor. And two days after that, the “residents” started to arrive. As each Daimler-Benz limousine drove up to the front steps, Kommandant Koch rushed out to greet the new guest, escorting her personally to the room that would be hers for the duration of her stay. Though the first women who arrived spoke German, others seemed to struggle with the language, and Elise and Marie took great joy in watching Koch trying to communicate with them without losing his aplomb.

The girls tried to be inconspicuous as they observed the comings and goings, a task made more difficult by the presence of Frau Heinz, a solidly built, middle-aged German nurse with graying blonde hair who took control of the running of the manor on the day the first resident arrived. She was a commanding presence, her voice gruff and her orders succinct, and though she spoke in an almost friendly manner to the women who were guests of the manor, she addressed Marie and Elise with a sort of professional contempt.

“I liked it a lot better around here when Koch was the only barbarian,” Elise said one morning as the friends were making up yet another bed in one of the upstairs rooms.

Marie wasn’t as concerned about Frau Heinz as she was about the residents. “Did you see Frau Bouret arrive this morning?”

“The pregnant one?”

“Pregnant to her eyeballs.”

Elise took special care folding the sheet around the corners of the
bed, lest Frau Heinz deem their efforts substandard and have them repeat the task, as she had on several previous occasions. “Koch was all over her the moment she arrived.”

“Maybe it’s the blonde hair.”

“She does look like an American movie star.”

Marie had spent several days trying to make sense of the new activity in the mansion, and Frau Bouret’s distended belly had provided her the puzzle piece she lacked. “Do you think the others are pregnant too?” Marie asked.

Elise stopped in the act of pulling a pillowcase over a down pillow. She looked at her friend. “What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking that there’s a room on this floor that looks an awful lot like a delivery room and that the only residents are women, one of whom is visibly pregnant.”

“Frau Rieux might be too. Either that or she’s built kind of strange.” Elise paused, squinting her eyes with the effort of analyzing what she’d observed since the first resident’s arrival. “Why would they be coming here to have their babies?” she asked. “Couldn’t they just find a hospital nearer to where they live? I mean, Frau Janssen is Dutch—surely there are working hospitals left in Holland!”

Marie shrugged. “Maybe she needed to get away for some reason.”

“I could ask Karl,” Elise suggested.

“You’re still seeing Karl?” Marie was appalled. Elise had met the young German soldier when she’d made a delivery to the castle several weeks before. The way she told it, there had been an instant attraction between them, Karl immediately approaching her to comment on the yellow dress that had caught his attention. But Marie distrusted the slight, tense Nazi whose Schütze rank was among the lowest in the Wehrmacht.

“We ran into each other at the market last week,” Elise said breezily. Too breezily for Marie’s liking.

“And you talked?”

“For a while,” Elise giggled, blonde curls bouncing. She caught Marie’s concerned glance and waved her suspicion away. “Oh, don’t be a mother! I’ve got one of those already, and she’s more than enough.” She tossed a pillow at Marie, followed by a pillowcase. “Karl hasn’t been anything but polite—you have nothing to worry about.”

Marie took a long look at her friend, registering Elise’s heightened color and dancing eyes, and wondered just how worried she really ought to be.