Luki looked to her, then walked on across the bridge.
What a brave girl you are.
Nanée hurried after her, wishing they could enter through the closer main door and hoping even a German wouldn’t shoot a child in the back.
Nanée tripped on the servants’-door threshold, sending the flowers flying as she sprawled onto the hard stone floor, but already the woman was kicking her feet out of the way and pulling the arched wooden door closed before the German soldiers fired that gun. She helped Nanée stand again, then scooped up the flowers and shepherded Nanée and Luki farther into a kitchen, which was warm and dry and smelled of yeasty bread.
Nanée was startled by a bell rung just above her. Six bells hung from the wall there, much like back in Evanston, each to summon staff to a different part of the house. The woman whispered for them to wait and disappeared, leaving them in a kitchen with arched stone ceilings, a huge fireplace with a smaller oven built into the wall beside it, and cabinets full of brass pots and pans and crockery, with more hanging on the walls, along with garlic and herbs. There was a water pump in one corner, a wide butchering table against a wall studded with all sizes of cleavers, and a side room filled with cabinets of china and food. In the center of it all stood a black iron oven four times the size even of the one at the house back in Evanston, where her parents threw parties for a hundred or more. Nanée wondered where the cooks and maids and other staff who must usually bring the place alive were now.
A clock ticked. A leaded window gave a view through a narrow stone arch to water. Was it the moat? The river itself? It was barely below them. Anyone who drew near in a boat could see right inside.
Luki looked up at her, still silent.
“Whisper,” Nanée whispered as quietly as possible.
Luki whispered, “Pemmy likes castles.”
The woman returned and hurried them up a staircase, past an extravagant gallery with a black-and-white marble floor and perhaps twenty huge arched windows all stretching across the river Cher. The dark doors at the far end were the doors to the free zone.
They continued on, though, up to a higher floor, where the woman tucked them into a hidden room not much bigger than a closet, with a single window crossed with iron.
“Talk in whispers,” the woman cautioned. “Stay away from the window. I’ve put your pretty bag in here so you can change your clothes. We’ll come get you when it’s safe to cross.”
Nanée nodded, already helping Luki out of the peasant clothes and into more appropriate attire for the niece of a wealthy American woman traveling to Marseille.
“You’ll walk fast as you can away from the river,” the woman said. “Don’t linger on the riverbank. If there are Germans, they’ll like as not shoot. A narrow footpath leads to the tomb of Madame Dupin, who they say enlisted Rousseau to help her write down the history of womankind, and perhaps she did and perhaps it’s here somewhere or perhaps some gentleman burned it up two hundred years ago, but her tomb—that’s what you’re looking for. Madame Dupin will be your guide to a path to the right that will take you to a farm. They won’t be surprised to see you. If it’s early in the day, they might be able to take you straight on to the train, but there’s no telling till it’s told.”
“Thank you for all you’re doing,” Nanée said, changing her own clothes now so the woman could take the case, wanting to ask the woman’s name, to thank her properly, but it was safer, always, to leave names unknown.
As the woman slipped quietly out, leaving Nanée and Luki in the little room with the single window that looked over a huge formal garden seeming to float on the water, about to break free and drift away, Luki pointed to the orange still in her hand. Nanée hesitated. Would the smell of an orange give them away to some less sympathetic porter or maid? But the whole chateau smelled of flowers, and of the river out the window. She took the orange and dug her nails in to peel it, releasing the crisp citrus scent.
LUKI WAS FAST asleep when a woman’s voice startled Nanée.
“This new German patrol seems to have set up on the river for the night, so we’re going to move you to a proper room,” the woman, who introduced herself as Simone Menier, said. She’d brought no light with her. “I don’t generally ask for names, Nanée, but I suppose you will know who I am, and the fact is, I know your mother.”
Nanée lifted Luki over her shoulder and followed Simone Menier down the stairs, past the gallery, which was lit now only by moonlight, and through a windowless entry hall with a vaulted ceiling carved with roses and cherubs and cornucopia, where Nanée could see in the electric light that Simone Menier was as elegantly beautiful as her home. As they ducked up a stunning staircase, the pitched ceiling here too carved with keys and faces, flowers and fruit, it occurred to Nanée to wonder how this lady of the chateau knew who she was.