In the dark, Isa saw nothing on the other side of the glass door. She knew she had only one real option, and that was to open the door before it was broken down.
“Isa! No!”
It was too late to heed Genny’s warning from the top of the stairs. Three soldiers loomed before her, guns held at their chests, helmeted and gloved as if for battle.
“Isabelle Lassone!”
Neither a greeting nor an inquiry, rather it was a demand.
“I am Isabelle Lassone.” She’d meant to sound brave but failed.
“You will come with us.”
Isa, too stunned to obey, did not move. Her feet felt bolted to the cold tile floor.
How easily those feet left the floor when the soldiers lifted and propelled her out of her house.
They let go at the curb, and the cobblestones felt colder than the tile beneath her bare feet, though not for long. They shoved her into the back of a wagon. She wanted to cry out, at least be allowed to get her slippers, but then she saw Genny, held back by the Major. The terror on Genny’s face was a beacon through the fog of Isa’s confusion, igniting the same terror in Isa—for herself.
* * *
“What’s wrong with it?” Edward asked. “Is the theology sound?”
“Yes.”
“Is the opposing argument unclear?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
Father Clemenceau placed the paper Edward had written on the desk before him and removed the spectacles from the bridge of his nose to analyze Edward. “It’s not the content, Edward. It’s honorable, true to the faith, in every aspect intelligently written. And I believe each word. But no pastor would dare read it from his pulpit.”
Edward spewed a sigh.
Father Clemenceau raised a supplicating hand. “Priests have been singled out by this occupying army as it is. Enough of us have been imprisoned for reading Cardinal Mercier’s letters—our own church leader, written to his own flock—because he had the gall, so the Germans say, to encourage his flock to long for justice. But this . . . this is outright thumbing one’s nose at the Germans. It all but calls them heathens!”
“The ones I know are exactly that.”
“I don’t doubt some are. But think, Edward. If any of my brethren were to read this from the pulpit, they’d be jailed. And will they take the risk for an anonymous author? I cannot ask them to risk their freedom—what they have left of such a notion—for this. I’m sorry; I cannot do it.”
Edward shook his head, closing his eyes. He’d stayed up all night writing the piece, knowing the church was his only avenue to expose the current mode of popular German thinking. He couldn’t publish it in La Libre Belgique. His connection to it might be exposed if he expressed the exact philosophy he’d heard at the dinner party.
He supposed he shouldn’t expect anyone else to take a risk. Even if it was all true, even if it would stir the hearts of believers to know without doubt that the message on the belt buckle worn by every German soldier wasn’t true—God wasn’t with all those who’d issued those buckles. They’d thrown Him out.
“I will pass this around to some of my fellow priests,” Father Clemenceau said. “It explains much, and perhaps it’ll help us to remember that God will prevail in the end. But of course it’s also true that others on our side have abandoned God. Some of our own neighbors. Each of us handles grief in our own way.”
Edward stood. He didn’t want to think about that; far less did he want to discuss why some had abandoned God.
But he wasn’t sorry he’d written the sermon, even if it would be read only by the close, trusted friends of Father Clemenceau. Edward wasn’t sure why he’d written it, except the words had poured from his pencil and couldn’t be stopped. It wasn’t a reaffirmation of his old faith; rather it was a concise explanation of how some justified what they did. By making man a machine, not a creation.
Edward left Father Clemenceau’s office, glancing at his wristwatch. Ten thirty in the morning. He would go to Isa’s to finish reassembling the press. The risk was already taken, so they may as well use it to the fullest.
* * *
Isa sat on the cot, bare feet beneath her, holding closed the lapels of her robe. When they’d brought her through the prisoners’ entrance to the Town Hall in the heart of the old city, she wasn’t sure which she’d felt more acutely: fear or