There was a hill next to the vineyard that was always covered in catchfly. I’d run through them, the skirt of my dress riding a gentle breeze capped with free-falling giggles and bees bumbling up from the grass. But Charlotte never would—not through the catchfly.’
‘Catchfly,’ she said, ‘very fitting.’
‘It is, now that I think of it—catchfly—but that was a very long time ago. A different life.’
‘You miss her, don’t you?’
‘There’s a lot to miss.’
‘War changes people, Adèle. I’ve said it before. Don’t give up on her. She’s your sister.’
I cried from Marguerite’s words, sniffling the more quiet seconds that passed with my thoughts on Charlotte. Her babies graves, the pain she must have felt, must still feel—it would make any woman delirious.
I did miss her, and once I admitted that to myself the ache in my gut, the longing for what once was, felt more like a gaping, empty hole. And for the first time since being captured I thought about dying, sobbing over Marguerite’s body as I petted her head, thinking I’d never see my sister or my family again.
Marguerite got very still. I thought she’d fallen asleep, her skin settling over her bones like a thin blanket, but then she spoke up.
‘Adèle,’ she said, taking a long pause. ‘I don’t know if I can survive more torture. I wanted to fight the war with all my bones. Now my bones are all I have left. Barbie will come back tomorrow—he said he would—and I can barely stand.’
‘The war will end, and we will have France back,’ I said. ‘The way it was.’
‘You don’t know that.’ Tears seeped from the corners of her closed eyes, making wet tracks down her face.
‘I know because my friend, Marguerite, told me so. She’s a résistant, you see, and she saved my life.’ Tears dripped from my chin as I caught my breath. ‘Once from a spy’s knife and again from a tomb of fallen rocks, so I feel like I can trust her.’
‘If only I could go back to the beginning.’ She put a hand to her face to mask the quivering. ‘I want to go back and remember—feel—the reasons why I joined the French Résistance in the first place.’
‘Feel,’ I repeated as I sat numb on the floor.
‘I miss my mother, my father. I miss Philip,’ she cried. ‘Everything has been taken from me. Everything. And it’s been so many years.’ She moved her hand so I could see her eyes. ‘Do you remember the days before the war?’
‘I remember Mama and Papa kissing in the garden. My sister and I cooking together in the kitchen, drinking wine.’ I paused, trying to remember how many years ago that was. ‘So many years have passed…’
‘That’s what I mean, Adèle. How much longer is it going to be?’ She looked angry now, trying to sit up, but her strength wouldn’t allow it. ‘Are the Germans winning? The British? We don’t know—been locked up here for months. It’s hard to stay hopeful without word of victories.’
I thought back to the day I peeked through the dirty window of the old convent and saw the Alliance hiding arms in the crypt, the spirit that burned in my chest for the Résistance. Now the only thing that burned are the sores from Claudette’s cigarettes. ‘I think of these things too, Marguerite.’
‘Perhaps I was naïve,’ she said, collapsing back onto my lap, ‘thinking I could be so bold as to be remembered—that many years from now people would look back on this time, and say, remember the French Résistance—the guns the women moved?’
‘I’ll remember.’ I looked at her. ‘I’ll remember you.’
She kissed my hand.
The sun set below my caged window and the room got very grey and dark, the walls closing in, reminding us that soon we would experience another day. Marguerite fell asleep on the floor where she lay, twitching and shivering.
27
That night I was woken by the most unusual thing: sound. Lights rolled over the ground and I heard the shuffle of weary feet marching along the shadowed edge of the building—prisoners. The Gestapo ordered them into hatched trucks, a hundred of them from what I counted. The rest of the Gestapo and guards alike rushed around, throwing boxes they had hauled out of the prison into the back of cars before speeding away, their headlamps shining over the humps of barbed wire that ran along the prison’s perimeter.
Marguerite lay on the floor, shivering under a soiled blanket despite the warmth of the summer night.