Tangled Ashes (8 page)

It was only after his eyes had adjusted to the dark that Becker noticed a faint light coming from the gatehouse. It shone, wavering, out the side window. A candle, perhaps, or light from a fireplace. Beck thought he saw a figure crossing the lawn in the fog, heading toward the stables with purpose and stealth—no more than a moving shadow in the stillness of the night—but he couldn’t be sure. The fog swirled on a soft, cold breeze, and the apparition vanished into the mobile gray.

Becker pushed the window nearly closed and returned to his bed. He held a hand up in front of his face. It shook visibly. He needed a drink—he needed it badly. But he’d been so busy during the day with planning and shopping for supplies that he’d forgotten how difficult his nights were without booze. He lay back, an arm bent behind his head, and tried to keep himself awake by planning for the work that would begin in just a few hours. As long as he didn’t sleep, he wouldn’t dream. And as long as he didn’t dream, he’d be okay.

Morning came as a relief. So did the smell of coffee and eggs wafting up the stairs from the kitchen. Becker got up quickly after merely dozing for a good portion of the night and rejuvenated his spirits with a long, hot shower. His mother had always told him that a cold one would do even better to wash away the cobwebs in his mind, but he wasn’t willing to test her theory quite yet.

He entered the kitchen with still-wet hair and the firm intention of being civil, which usually required limited contact with humans. His resolution teetered a little when he found Thérèse sitting at the table. Jade was slicing bread at the counter.

“Good morning,” he said, stopping just inside the kitchen’s archway, eyeing the pot of coffee still in the percolator and the pan of eggs on the stove. He glanced at Thérèse, who sat starchily across from the twins. She nodded her greeting. The twins watched him with a mixture of awe and caution. He looked at Eva. She immediately averted her gaze, dropping her chin and letting her eyes drift toward her brother. When Beck looked at Philippe, the six-year-old crossed his arms and stared right back. He was wearing the same outfit as his sister, though his sweatshirt was blue and hers was red. But the jeans and sneakers were pretty much the same.

“Shouldn’t you be reading or writing or something?” Beck asked. He wasn’t crazy about talking to kids, particularly not first thing in the morning.

Eva, whose hair was pulled back on the sides with barrettes that matched her sweatshirt, leaned across the table toward him and spoke in a secretive voice. “Jade said we don’t have to start until eight thirty. That way she can make breakfast for everybody and get it cleaned up.”

“Yeah?” Becker wasn’t exactly pleased by the news. “Sounds like a good reason to eat somewhere else,” he muttered. “That way you two can start your lessons earlier.”

Eva’s eyes widened. Eating in another room was apparently frowned on. But Jade turned from the counter with a basket of bread in her hands and deposited it on the table with a smile that held a bit of a challenge. “You, Mr. Becker,” she said, “are a grown-up. You can eat wherever you like.”

“Good,” he said. “I’ll take it in my office, then.”

Jade’s smile got deeper and, somehow, a little icier too. “I’ll bring it right in,” she said with utter courtesy.

Becker turned toward the door.

“In case you’re wondering,” came Thérèse’s shrill voice, “I’m waiting on a crew from the satellite company in Chantilly. They’re sending someone over to install the dish. Should be here any minute.” Her voice trailed off as Becker slipped out of sight. He was fairly sure he heard her harrumph and the children giggle before he closed the door.

Jade entered his office a few minutes later, holding a tray loaded with breakfast. Beck was sitting at the desk, having moved it closer to the window for better light, and was finishing the sketch he’d started the day before of the elaborate woodwork of the staircase. He didn’t look up when she asked, “Would you like it on the desk or on the coffee table?”

“Coffee table’s fine.”

She deposited the tray on the marble slab that sat on brass legs and turned to Beck, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her wraparound apron. She wore a plaid skirt in browns and beiges and a deep-green cardigan that made her already-dark eyes seem an even deeper shade of walnut brown. Her slender feet were clad in low-heeled pumps. The better to run after the twins, no doubt. “How’s the smell in your apartment?” she asked, not in the least put out by the lack of eye contact and communication coming from the other side of the room.

“Better,” Beck said, following the flowing curve of the banister with his charcoal pencil. He looked up. “I’ll actually be tearing most of the floorboards out of that corner this afternoon. Get rid of it for good.” It was a decision he’d reached around dawn.

“Tearing up the floorboards?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Just . . . tearing them out?”

He looked up. “Is there a problem?”

“You can’t tear up those floorboards. They’ve been there for centuries!” There was genuine distress in her voice.

Becker put down his pencil. “It’s going to happen eventually anyway. It’s no use trying to restore boards that are that damaged.”

She eyed him with suspicion. “I certainly hope you know what you’re doing,” she said. Something sparked in her eyes. “This castle is like a living organism, and I’d hate to see you amputate something that can’t be replaced.”

Beck smiled a little at the intensity of her expression and tried to mirror it with his own. “I’ll do my very best not to amputate any major organs,” he said with exaggerated seriousness, like a television doctor in a tacky reenactment. “You have my word,
ma’am
.”

Jade gave him a sidelong glance and undid the strings of her apron. She pulled it over her head as she moved to the tall door of
the office. “I’m off to teach the children,” she said, adding “sir” in a pointed way. “The satellite people arrived, by the way. I’m sure Thérèse will be in to inform you of their progress. Just leave the tray by the door when you’re finished, and I’ll take care of it later.”

As she was pulling the heavy door closed behind her, Becker called her back. “Jade.” He hadn’t said her name before. It sounded foreign and somehow intimate on his lips. He didn’t like the feeling. “It’s a standard renovation process,” he explained as she stood in the doorway with a hand on her hip. “By the time I’m finished with that floor, you won’t be able to tell where the original wood is missing.”

She wrinkled her nose at him. “We’ll see.”

AUGUST 1943

I
T WAS
K
ARL
who finally shed some light on the goings-on that Kommandant Koch and Nurse Heinz so meticulously oversaw. Elise had run into him during one of her shopping trips to town, and he’d offered to help carry the meager groceries she’d bought to the Horch staff car in which a German driver waited to take her back to the manor.

As they walked, Elise asked Karl what he knew about what was happening at the manor.

“They’re SS,” he said, his heavily accented French the product of four years of study in the German school system. “We Wehrmacht don’t know what happens at the manor.”

“But . . . aren’t you all part of the same army?”

He smiled tightly. “We fight in the same war, yes, but I don’t think your manor’s Kommandant Koch and our castle’s Generalmajor
Müller want any more contact than that. The SS consider themselves—how do you say it? Superior.” It was a difficult word for the young officer to pronounce, and Elise had him repeat it twice before she was satisfied with his accent.

“There are new residents at the manor,” Elise said as they approached the car that would drive her back up the hill and into the dense woods. “All women—all having babies,” she added, remembering the tall blonde who was due any moment.

“German?” Karl slowed his pace to stretch the remaining time they had to speak.

Elise shook her head. “Mostly French. But some from Belgium and other places too.”

“And what happens to the babies after they’re born?”

“None of them have been born yet,” Elise explained. “Why do you ask?”

Karl stopped walking and faced Elise, the basket of groceries in his hand somehow mitigating the austerity of his uniform. “There’s a program,” he said. “I’ve only heard of it, but . . .” He lowered his voice. “It’s an SS program they call Lebensborn.”

“Lebensborn?”

“‘Fount of Life’ in German. I don’t know much, but your manor—they must be trying to start a Lebensborn in France.”

“What are the Lebensborns for?” Elise asked.

Karl shot her a warning glance, then darted his eyes toward the car. He lowered his voice. “Their purpose is to expand the master race,” he said. “Women go there to . . .” He searched for the right word. “They go there to deliver Aryan babies and give them over to the Reich—to be raised as Hitler would want them to be.”

Elise wasn’t sure she was understanding correctly. Part of her hoped she wasn’t. “You mean—they’re having these babies to help with the war?”

“It’s an act of loyalty. Himmler has encouraged SS officers to father children with Aryan women in order to—how do you say it? In order to expand the race.”

“Wait . . .” Elise shook her head, unable to grasp the significance of what she was hearing. “These women are coming to the manor to give birth to Aryan children?”

“Yes.”

“And they’re going to leave here without them?”

“It’s a most noble gesture. Their children will be adopted by worthy German families who will raise them in comfort, with Nazi ideals.”

There was a trace of pride in Karl’s voice that startled Elise. “But why can’t they raise the kids themselves?” She was appalled. “The husbands come to visit all the time—can’t they take the babies home with them after they’re born?”

Karl resumed walking. The driver from the manor saw them coming and got out of the car to open the back door for Elise. “They probably aren’t the women’s husbands,” Karl said, his voice low. “Himmler made it clear that marriage was not to get in the way of the expansion of the Reich. The instructions are to procreate as much as they can, with as many devoted women as are willing to conceive.”

Elise stopped abruptly. “Are you telling me that . . . ?” There were so many questions in her mind that she couldn’t narrow them down, and the driver was waiting rather impatiently for her to climb into the car. “So what you’re saying is that the manor is a—a baby factory?” she asked, her voice hushed with incomprehension.

Karl shrugged, his voice almost inaudible as she brushed by him to bend into the back seat. “It’s a place where SS officers and the women they love can prove their allegiance to the Reich.” Elise looked up and caught the glint of approval in his eyes. “There is no limit to what a true soldier will do for his Führer.”

Elise tracked Marie down immediately upon her return to
the manor, filling her in on the sordid details she’d learned from Karl, but neither of them fully believed his story until the first of the mothers gave birth a week later. They could hear her moaning and screaming upstairs for hours, the nurses running in and out of the delivery room for most of the afternoon. Just before suppertime, Marie heard the sound of a crying newborn and shushed Elise, who had been engrossed in the telling of one of her lengthy stories. They both tiptoed out to the foot of the stairs and listened to the infant sounds reaching them from above.

The baby was immediately committed to the nurses’ care, and though the mother stayed on at the manor for a few days following the delivery, neither Elise nor Marie ever saw her with the baby. It was the nurses who fed, bathed, and swaddled him, and once the mother was well enough to leave, she was escorted to the limousine by an ever-attentive Kommandant Koch. Her baby, a boy, was given the first crib in a nursery that held ten. Within a month, three more cribs would be filled.

Birgitt, one of the friendlier nurses at the manor, was the first to invite the girls into the nursery. Though she made it look like it was merely a friendly gesture, it quickly became clear that her ulterior motive was to garner some free help. After their third or fourth visit, she began asking them to perform minor tasks like emptying trash cans and changing diapers. As the baby population of the manor increased, so did the frequency of their visits to the nursery. But they had strict instructions not to play with the babies and to limit their attention to necessary contact.

The two girls were standing in the kitchen sterilizing bottles one morning when Koch came storming in, going straight to Marie and grabbing her by the hair. “You’ve been in the nursery?” he hissed.

“I—yes, Kommandant, I . . . ,” Marie stuttered. “I’ve been helping with the babies. . . .”

“On whose authority?” he demanded, his fist tightening in her hair.

Elise stood across the kitchen from Marie, her eyes wide and the color draining from her face. “We were just doing what they asked,” she said, barely above a whisper.

“Who?” he snapped, turning on Elise so quickly that Marie lost her footing as he yanked her hair. “Who asked you to help?”

The two girls stared at each other. “Birgitt,” Marie finally said. “Birgitt asked us to help. But we don’t mind,” she quickly added. “We don’t mind at all.”

Kommandant Koch released her hair so suddenly that she stumbled and caught herself on the edge of the sink. He swiveled and marched out of the room, his boots thudding as he took the stairs two at a time.

It was Frau Heinz who convinced the Kommandant to let Birgitt remain at the castle, lauding her initiative in recruiting help for the nursery and assuring him that she was a valuable asset in the Lebensborn. She also persuaded him to let Marie and Elise continue helping with the babies, as the workload was increasing exponentially with each woman who gave birth. After some further discussion, Kommandant Koch agreed, but when he found Marie coming out of the nursery on her first day of official duty, he stepped in her way as she walked toward the stairs.

“If you breathe a word of what you see here to anyone—anyone—you and your family will suffer the consequences,” he said, his breath foul against her face. “Is that understood?” There was an unmistakable threat in his eyes, and Marie and Elise pledged that day that the manor’s secrets would be safe with them.

As time went by, the number of mothers at the Lebensborn increased, sometimes reaching fifteen at once. They spent their days strolling in the Japanese garden, reading in the library, or knitting
in the conservatory. The SS fathers of the babies came only occasionally, usually bearing flowers and always looking a little tense. Their visits seldom lasted longer than an hour, and Marie and Elise wondered if their trips to the manor were motivated by desire or by duty. They had no such questions about the couples who came to claim the children they’d been given to raise. They arrived with hesitant smiles and left exuding pride, holding a weeks- or months-old baby in their arms.

“You think Lisbeth’s going to be happy with her new parents?” Elise asked, blinking back tears as an older, regal couple bundled the baby into their waiting car.

“I don’t know,” Marie murmured. “And I don’t think anyone really cares.”