Blackened fingers wrap tight around my arm, and as I try to wrench free, we both fall to the ground. I scream bloody murder all the way down—but my scream is cut off by a dirty hand clamping over my mouth.
Then I’m left to struggle under the bearded stranger’s weight, terrified of what he might do. Even before the war, desperate men fled to the French countryside. This one might be a Spanish revolutionary who can’t go home without Franco lining him up against a wall. Maybe a communist on the run from the law, or a hidden foreign Jew, or a dangerous highwayman. I don’t know which, but I bite like a rabid animal, sinking my teeth deep.
The taste of iron blood fills my mouth, and my attacker cries out, yanking his hand away.
“Get off, you bastard!” I fight like crazy, kicking and slugging.
Then other men emerge, rifles slung over their shoulders, and I think I’m done for.
“Let her go,” one of them shouts. “She’s harmless.”
Heaving stinking breaths in my face, the man who grabbed me finally sits up on his haunches, releasing me. And that’s when I realize that the man who told him to let me go is Gabriella’s father. I’m shocked to see Uriah Kohn’s familiar face, and almost wouldn’t have recognized him now that he’s grown a mustache. I want to ask what the hell he’s doing out here with dangerous-looking men, but I don’t want to stay and find out.
Scrambling to my feet in a shower of pine needles, I bolt away.
“Arrêtez!” he calls after me, but I don’t stop. A branch whips my face and tears the hat from my head, but I don’t stop for that either. I just keep running, slipping on wet earth as I go. Christ, I must’ve been out of my head to come this way alone, even if I have been tromping in these woods all my life.
“S’il vous pla?t, mademoiselle!”
Panting and breathless, my coat covered with brambles, I gasp, “What do you want?”
“To explain,” he says, catching up with me. “To apologize. These days, for people like me, it’s safer in the forest. Do you understand?”
Given what’s happening in the Occupied Zone, who can blame him for going into hiding? But the men he’s with have guns. Bolt-action rifles and revolvers—there’s no way they have permits for them. “Does Madame Pinton know you’re armed?”
He grimaces. “Mademoiselle, I made my career in the army. They may say I can’t serve because I’m a Jew. But mark my words, when the time comes, I’m not going to go meekly.”
I don’t know what he means by when the time comes.
“My daughter. She’s well?”
I nod. “She’s made a pet of the castle’s meanest old tomcat. You should visit Chavaniac to see her.”
“I can’t,” he says. “Someone in the village might recognize me. I went to school at the castle, you see.”
I blink. I had no idea. He must have been in one of the first graduating classes. I would have been too young to know or remember him. But Madame Simon would; no wonder she changed her mind about helping him. And of course now I understand why he brought his family to Auvergne; he knows that a deep, dark wood that is cold even in springtime makes for a good place to hide.
He offers back my red beret. “Here, I’m sorry. No one meant to hurt or frighten you.”
“Just keep it,” I say, still a little angry with Anna, and knowing he needs a warm hat more than I do.
By the time I limp back to the road, my nerves are so shot that when a car sputters up next to me, I nearly duck back behind a tree. Then I recognize the gendarme in the driver’s seat.
“Mademoiselle?” Sergeant Travert calls from the open window of his black-and-white, steering to the side of the road, tires crunching on gravel. I try to tuck my hair back into bobby pins that have come loose. It’s hopeless, and his voice lowers in concern. “Is something wrong?”
I shake my head. I feel a bruise welling on my knee and my pant leg is cut up, but no real harm has come to me; I’ve just taken a fright.
Travert asks, “You’re hurt?”
We’re supposed to report things like armed men hiding in the woods, but I say, “I stumbled over a log.”
The gendarme glances to the woods, then back to me. “You seem shaken.”
If he’s suspicious, he might go looking. And if he goes looking, someone’s going to get hurt, so I try to be more convincing. “I just . . . I had an argument with a friend, and wanted to clear my head. I lost track of where I was.”