Blood Game, page 35
“Aye,” James replied.
Albert turned that blue gaze on her.
“What do you want to know about Micheleine?”
And so it began, an unexpected connection between two men, one old, one young, who had both seen too much, experienced too much, and carried the scars.
Over the next two hours, she told him everything, beginning with the photograph Cate had sent, that last text message, and everything that had happened since.
“You believe she spoke of the tapestry.” Albert gestured to the copy of that photograph. “And you have come here to learn what I know.”
Kris nodded. “We need your help. I need to know why my friend died.”
He nodded, then looked over at Valentine.
“We must have coffee for our guests.”
“Behave yourself,” she told him with mock seriousness. She leaned past him and took the old shotgun propped against the chair beside him. She set it against the wall beside the hearth.
“He says it is to chase the crows from the orchards.” She explained. “I'm afraid he will shoot himself.”
“If I chose to do that, it would already be done,” Albert grumbled, but his eyes twinkled at what was obviously a frequent argument between them. Valentine kissed him on the forehead then went to the kitchen.
“She is bossy, but she has a good heart,” he told them. “She works very hard and she takes good care of me. This will be hers one day. She is the only one of our family left.”
He gestured across the room to the long table that sat against the wall beside the woodstove.
“There are pictures, before the war; Micheleine, her mother and father, brothers and sister, and my Angeline.”
Kris picked up the framed black-and-white photograph of the young family that had obviously been taken before the war. Both parents were seated, with a boy standing at either side—Micheleine's brothers who had died in the war—a toddler on her mother's lap, obviously Angeline, and a young girl seated on the floor in front, the hem of her dress tucked under her knees. There was no mistaking the young Micheleine.
The dark hair was the same, the eyes, her features, strength in the stubborn set of her chin—strength enough to protect her family when her father and brothers had gone off to join the Resistance, strength when they were killed and she took their place fighting the Germans, possibly hiding a priceless work of art from them.
The coffee was dark and strong as Albert told them about the young woman who became known as Jehanne, and the last time he had seen her when she returned to the farm in those last days of the war.
“She had been wounded. I tried to convince her to stay, there was hope that the war was almost over. But she could be very stubborn.” He paused, passed a hand over his mouth at the memory, then went on.
“She was afraid her presence would endanger others. The Germans were still everywhere, moving ahead of the Allies. Dangerous, no one was safe.” He paused again, remembering, old anger in the expression on his face.
“No one,” he repeated, his mouth working with other words that wouldn't come. He cleared his throat.
“She said there was still work to be done.” He was thoughtful at the memory. “We all had work to do.” He frowned, a slight tremor on the hand that wiped his eyes.
“I did not see her again. There were rumors of things that happened,” he said in that sad voice, as Valentine brought more coffee.
“Her mother cried and cried afterward. First her sons, then her husband. All gone.” He looked over at James.
“You know what it is to lose those you love, family, friends,” he said.
“I know,” James replied.
Albert nodded, in that unspoken way she had seen more than once with her brother Mark, that silent communication between those who have been in dark places where no words are necessary.
“Did Micheleine ever mention anything to you about the tapestry in this photograph? It was called the Raveneau Tapestry.”
He stared at the printout. He shrugged and shook his head. “I would remember if she said anything about it.”
Then she handed him the copy Sophie Martin had made of the letter Micheleine wrote and hid in that cellar.
“This letter was found after the war. It was written to her mother.”
He studied the copy of the letter, the perfect neat letters and those unusual marks that had been made at the edge of the paper. The lettering and those marks had faded over time. The copy was barely legible.
“It was found in a cellar at a house outside Amiens after the war,” Kris explained. “It mentions a hospital, but we were told there was no hospital here during the war.”
Albert stared down at the printed copy of that last letter Micheleine had written. Over seventy years ago.
What did he see? What did he remember?
His hand trembled slightly as he rubbed it across his forehead as if he could physically pull the memories out of his thoughts. He slowly shook his head.
Kris tried to hide her disappointment.
“I am sorry,” Valentine apologized. “I know this was important to you...because of your friend.”
“Souviens...” Albert said in French, something he hadn't thought about in a very long time, since he was a boy, before the war.
“Je me souviens.”
“Qu'est-ce que c'est?” Valentine asked him.
“Le carrierre,” Albert replied.
Valentine looked over at them.
“The quarry.”
CHAPTER
FORTY-ONE
“Iwas very young, before the war,” Albert explained. “Micheleine's brothers, they were older. They didn't want me with them, a nuisance they said.” A smile at the memory in spite of the late hour of the night.
“But I followed them anyway.” Ju-Ju lay curled at his feet as he continued to reminisce.
“No one was supposed to go near the quarry—too dangerous they said.” He winked at them.
“I threatened to tell their father if they didn't take me with them.”
A boy on an adventure, like most boys, before the war, Kris thought. Over seventy years ago.
Vilette, Micheleine, and Albert Marchand, their lives divided into two time frames—before the war and after. An event that had changed the lives of so many, and ended so many others.
As he described that day long ago, two teenagers and a young tagalong on an adventure, Kris thought of pictures she had seen of quarries around the world in online articles about changing ecosystems, natural resources that had either played out or were shut down because of environmental hazards. Places that were huge open wounds carved out of the earth, enormous earth movers scraping away layer after layer, leaving scars on the landscape, with photographs of mine workers from places like South Africa, in search of diamonds or other precious metals, squinting as they emerged from dark holes in the ground.
“It was closed for many years,” Albert continued. “Since before the first war, too dangerous to go there, the old ones who once worked there said—explosives left behind, cave-ins, tunnels where one could get lost. But we were determined to go, perhaps because it was forbidden.” That boyish smile appeared.
She could imagine the young boy he had once been, as the memory took hold and he told them about the long ride in the farm wagon, almost bounced off more than once on the dusty road on that long-ago summer day. When they could drive no farther, the road blocked by enormous boulders that had been rolled into place to block others from continuing on, they had all piled out of the wagon and continued on foot, down through the heavily wooded forest that eventually opened at the edge of the limestone quarry.
“It was like a building carved out of the stone. There were windows, some of them broken, and steel doors that rolled back,” he continued.
“Etienne and Edouard finally pushed one door open, and we went inside. A tree had grown from the floor through the ceiling over the years,” Albert continued.
“Dirt and debris covered everything. “We walked down a long tunnel. It was dark, but they had brought lanterns. There were marks carved into the walls. I tried to remember them so that we could find our way back.”
Clever boy, Kris thought. And years later, clever enough to elude the Germans during the war.
“The tunnel went in many directions. Etienne decided that we should each go a different way to see what we could find then meet back at the entrance. I went with Edouard. We followed a rail track into another part of the quarry.
“There were several rooms cut into the stone walls, one with a table, another larger one with cots lined up along a wall, more cots in another room, rolls of old cloth, utensils, and a long wood table.
“It was said that the English had taken their wounded there during the first war. We found marks on the walls, days marked off, carvings, and crosses.”
A place where the English had taken their wounded during World War I, the tunnels and walls of the quarry mine, refuge in the midst of slaughter and dying. Cots lined up against a wall, tables, rolls of cloth. A hospital?
Was that what Micheleine had meant in that letter?
She looked at the copy of the letter, then handed it to Albert.
“Did you see anything that looked like these marks?”
“I remember a carving of a woman with a scarf tied around her head, and she wore an apron. I remember thinking she was so beautiful in such an ugly place.”
A carving of a woman wearing an apron.
If the quarry had been used a as a hospital, with wounded soldiers on those cots, was it possible what he had seen was a carving of a nurse made all those years ago by some young soldier recovering from his wounds?
“There was talk many years ago about reopening the quarry,” he continued. “But nothing came of it.”
A forgotten place from another century. Forgotten, and possibly the perfect place to hide something that someone didn't want found.
But places like that didn't just disappear, Kris thought. Over the years, using modern technology, satellite images from outer space, infrared equipment, numerous old temples and artifacts hidden or buried, had been discovered that decades earlier would have been impossible.
“Do you think you could find the entrance again?”
She avoided the look James gave her but she could feel it, and the anger that this was to be the end of it, that it had gotten too dangerous to continue. Four people were dead, and with the information Danny had provided, that danger might be close, too close. And what about Valentine and her grandfather?
“I could take you there,” Valentine spoke up.
Her grandfather frowned at her, and said something that could only be disapproval.
“You are not the only one who has been there,” she told him.
“It was the last summer before I went to university. Several of us decided to go there. It was grown over, but it wasn't caved in. We had no flashlights and decided against going inside.” Again there was that shrug, typical of her grandfather.
“So I never said anything to you about it,” she explained to Albert. She looked over at Kris. There was excitement in her voice.
“We could go tomorrow. Perhaps you will find one of those marks,” she gestured to the letter that Micheleine had hidden decades earlier.
“Then you will know if that is the place she wrote about.”
“No,” Albert said quietly. “It is too dangerous.”
Valentine knelt in front of her grandfather's chair. “How many times have I listened to you say that no one today wants to know what happened then, no one understands, and soon no one will remember.” She took his hand in hers.
“If we can find one of those marks, if the tapestry is there, it would be a way of remembering what happened, the sacrifice that was made to keep it safe.”
“And if there is nothing?” he asked her.
“Then there is nothing,” she replied. “But we have to try, we have to hope.”
Kris saw the way his expression changed on that one word. Hope.
“Stubborn,” he told his granddaughter. “You use my words against me.”
“Like someone I know very well,” she told him.
Albert looked over at James.
“You will go with them.” When James would have objected, Albert shook his head.
“You must go, you must keep them safe.”
“You don't understand.”
“I understand very well, my young friend.” It was there in the expression on his face, in his eyes. The same expression when he had seen the tattoo of the sword and recognized a kindred spirit.
Kris saw the anger, the conflict, his eyes dark when James finally looked at her. Nothing was said. It wasn't necessary.
“It was my grandmother's room when she was a little girl,” Valentine said as she retrieved wool blankets from the chest that sat against the wall and laid them on the bed.
And Micheleine's, Kris thought.
The metal frame bed sat against the end wall in the second-floor room, tucked under the eaves of the farmhouse. A tall, old-fashioned dresser with hand-painted flowers that sat against the wall beside the door, like the table and chairs in the kitchen, had faded over time. A straight-backed chair and small writing desk sat under the window. A half dozen wooden pegs lined the wall adjacent to the door, a woolen neck scarf thrown over the one at the far end. Wood frame windows covered with chintz curtains were closed against the storm, icy rain pelting the glass.
This was where a young girl had spent her childhood and watched the signs of war that eventually took her father and both her brothers. And then her.
She imagined generations of children over two hundred years earlier who lay on cots or blankets beneath those same eaves, whispering in the dark when they should have been sleeping, planning their next adventure. Then another generation, listening for other sounds, of an automobile on that dirt road, voices in an unfamiliar language, boot steps on the wood floors below.
Micheleine Robillard had returned that last time, Albert told them, wounded but alive, hiding from enemy patrols after the Allied invasion. They had spoken in that very same kitchen and he had shared a piece of bread with her, all he had for a meal. She had asked about friends, neighbors, people from the village, then about her mother and sister.
“Tell them I am well, and give them my love,” she said as they parted that last time.
“And you will come back when this is over,” young Albert had replied. Then they parted, and he took the secret of that last meeting with him.
It had been cold, snowing hard, he said, the weather much the same as now. And it had grown dark. He learned later that she had she stayed the night, waiting for morning, and the weather to clear.
Had she slept one last time in that same bed that she had once shared with her sister? What were her thoughts? What were her dreams? Were they filled with things that haunted her, things she'd seen and done? Or was there someone special who filled those dreams? Did she sense that she would never see her mother and sister again?
“There are times, when I am up here, it's almost as if...” Valentine softly smiled.
“You will think it is foolish.” She hesitated again. “But there are times it's as if she is still here. That if I turned around suddenly, I would see her standing there. Foolish, yes?”
Not foolish, Kris thought. It was part of who Valentine was.
“There are extra blankets in the chest,” the girl said as she plugged in the oil heater on the wall.
“It gets cold up here during the winter.”
“I didn't mean to take your room,” Kris replied, when it suddenly occurred to her that was probably what she had done.
Valentine shook her head. “My room is downstairs at the back of the house, if my grandfather should need me in the middle of the night. He sleeps in his chair most nights, but usually not more than a couple of hours at a time. He is restless, and has dreams. But tonight, your friend will keep him company.”
Ghosts of the past, something else James Morgan had in common with Albert Marchand. He hadn't spoken when she left with Valentine, but had instead retrieved the chess board Albert had pointed to on that long table.
“Do you play?” the wily old man had asked. “We will see,” he added with a smile as James set the board on the table between them.
“There is more room here,” Valentine pointed out. That smile again. “Private for you and your friend.”
Kris almost laughed. She doubted James considered her a friend at the moment. And when they left the room downstairs there wasn't even a glance away from that board and the game, another glimpse of James Morgan.
Where, she thought, had a young man who grew up with no father, then went off to war and saw too much, lost too much, learned to play chess? In some remote corner of the world with friends who were gone? Their memory in a tattoo on his wrist?
“The bathroom is downstairs,” Valentine went on to explain, pulling her back from her thoughts.
“You have to turn the heat on the boiler for the shower. It is electric but takes a little while to warm up. There are towels on the shelf.” She hesitated at the door, a thoughtful expression at her face.
“Thank you,” Valentine said, surprising her.
“We should be thanking you,” Kris replied. “It isn't everyday two strangers show up on your doorstep with a story most people wouldn't believe.”
Valentine shook her head. “You don't understand.” She was thoughtful again, trying to find the words to explain.
“There are times when I see a look on my grandfather's face as if he has gone far away. It is a sadness for things I cannot understand. But tonight, these past hours, I have seen a change in him. It is because you are here, and James Morgan who has seen some of the same things and understands what my grandfather has carried with him all these years.” She took a deep breath.
“He is the only family I have left. It is the reason I came back. I know that he will be gone one day. So, I say thank you. Please understand that meeting you both has meant a great deal to both of us. Even if the tapestry is not there.”
