“I said I didn’t know anyone named Minerva Furlaud, which is true.”
You shouldn’t shake this tree, I tell myself for the thousandth time. I might find out something I don’t want to know. Something that might endanger me with the authorities. The baroness didn’t want Madame Simon to leave the preventorium, but she didn’t put a stop to it either, and they were friends. If I was in trouble, would the baroness help me, or would I too be on my own? I don’t know who I can trust or what’s safe to ask, but having found this photograph, I just can’t help myself. “You don’t think there’s a connection between this Furlaud and the one on my birth record?”
“If there is a connection worth mentioning . . . well, Beatrice would’ve told you.”
The baroness is usually a very direct person, but she’s avoiding my gaze. And though I’m afraid if I press her too hard, she’ll clam up, I say, “Do you know what I think? I think he was more than a banker and more to Madame Beatrice than just a friend. I think he was a French officer. In fact, I think he’s the same French officer pictured with a little pigtailed girl in a photograph hanging in the tower room where I sleep every night. And I think that little girl might be me. So what’s the story?”
Her lips purse. “One that’s not mine to tell.”
I press my own lips together, knowing my timing couldn’t be worse. There’s an epidemic of scarlet fever afflicting the older boys right now, and she’s preoccupied with it. Still, I have to know. “But there is a story?”
She whirls on me. “Marthe, my heart goes out to you, truly it does—”
“Does it?” I snap, sure she’s holding back.
“Yes, my heart truly does,” she says, voice softening. “I won’t pretend to know what you’re going through, but I have some notion of what it’s like to grow up without a mother—to wonder where she might be, or if she ever cared, or—”
“What?” I nearly stammer with surprise.
She drops her eyes and clears her throat, like she’s embarrassed. “My own mother left me when I was six, and I spent my youth wondering what was wrong with me that she could have done such a thing. It took me a long time to learn that though the people who bring us into being are important, and it’s natural to want to know them, we all become people of our own making. That’s all Beatrice ever wanted for you . . .”
I’m still absorbing her words when a policeman’s car pulls up in front of the dormitory. Sergeant Travert and another gendarme step out. Merde. They’re probably here because of the STO. And they’re probably looking for Sam and others who have gone into hiding rather than be sent to Germany.
But the baroness grumbles, “What trouble do you suppose our boys have gotten into now?”
I bite my lip, worrying that Oscar has been caught drawing anti-Nazi graffiti again. I’ve warned him repeatedly that boys can be shot for that, and my belly fills with dread as Sergeant Travert climbs the steps, pistol at his hip. Before he can get to the veranda, the baroness marches straight up to him and blocks his path, hands on her hips. “What brings you to the preventorium, Sergeant?”
I glance at the yard where Oscar and his mischief-makers were doing jumping jacks before the gendarmes arrived, and I want to shout, Run, Oscar, Run!
But as it turns out, the gendarmes aren’t here for Oscar.
They’re not here for Sam either.
They’re here for me.
THIRTY-SEVEN
ADRIENNE
Paris
September 1791
My husband’s guardsmen, like young Captain Romeuf, pleaded with us to stay in Paris, but Lafayette wished to be a victorious general who gave power back to the people before retiring to the life of a gentleman farmer. He wanted to be the George Washington of France.
For my part, I was eager to leave for Chavaniac without delay. I threw everything into trunks, arranging for two coaches to take us up into the mountains. On the day of our departure, the National Guard presented my husband with his second sword of honor—this one made from the iron bolts of the Bastille and carved with his motto, Cur Non?
On our way to Chavaniac, I attempted to visit my sister Pauline, but she refused to receive us for fear of her royalist father-in-law’s wrath. Instead, she met us on the road, and there confessed in the privacy of the coach, “I am leaving France.”
Desperately, I grasped her hands. “No, Pauline. Not now when things have finally been put right.”
Gilbert also tried to persuade her against this course of action, which so many were now calling treason, but she would not hear him. “Royalists think you are the traitor, Gilbert. Worse, your Revolutionary friends think so too. They wanted to cut off Adrienne’s head!”