Travert has probably figured out that I’m working with the Resistance now—he’s not stupid—but he doesn’t ask questions. Now I explain my conditions to Monsieur Kohn. “You give me the children’s names and photographs from the OSE, and I’ll give you the papers. No one else should know I’m involved.”
Except Madame Pinton, who has been silent in her rocking chair all this time. She’s still quiet after he leaves, grim-faced as she makes lace, weaving bobbins and pinning threads on a pillow in the ancient way once taught at Adrienne Lafayette’s school. It’s been a little over a year since we learned Henri was dead, and I know we’re both thinking it. “I don’t see you much anymore since you married the gendarme.”
I want to defend myself by saying it’s not a real marriage—that even as I’ve come to know and like Travert, I’ve kept my emotional distance—but I know how it must look. She’s been mourning her dead husband for nearly three decades. I married Travert just months after learning of Henri’s death. If she’s disgusted with me, I can’t blame her. “I had to marry him.”
It isn’t true in one way, but it is in all the others.
“You didn’t ask my blessing,” she says.
I tell her what I’ve been telling myself. “I knew you’d take it as an insult to Henri’s memory, and I was too depressed to stomach your perpetual disapproval without wanting to slit my wrists.”
Her head jerks up. “I don’t disapprove of you.”
I cross my arms over myself. “I know you never wanted me to marry Henri.”
“That’s true.” She puts down her lace-making. “Since you were a girl, you were like a feral cat, prone to hiss and scratch. You never trusted anyone or let anyone get too close. Not even my Henri.”
Her words are so painful, I actually have to take a few breaths to recover. “Well, you sure have my number . . .”
“Now I know you’re not a feral cat, but a lioness, and that not even Henri knew how brave you really are.”
A sudden sob catches in my throat. I try to hold it back by pressing the back of my hand to my lips, but tears spill over. I have to turn away until I get hold of myself. When did I get so weepy—and why is Madame Pinton, of all people, being kind? “You’re the one who took in Jewish boarders.”
“I wanted my roof thatched.”
I manage a teary, wobbly smile.
“Marthe, I’ve lost a husband and a son. I can’t lose you too. If the gendarme protects you, then you have my blessing, and you were right to marry him.”
* * *
—
I’m not so sure I was right to marry him the next night, when Travert shouts, “Tell me you won’t have anything to do with this!”
“Keep your voice down,” I hiss. We’re in the old vaulted kitchen that I don’t think has been redecorated since Lafayette’s time. Since the dorms were moved into the castle proper, little girls are always wandering in and out until nurses chase them back to their hospital beds, so the walls have ears.
Travert quiets down, but slaps a flyer onto the wooden table—a flyer we’ve all seen. “Well?”
“We always celebrate Bastille Day in Chavaniac. The castle’s keystone is a stone from the Bastille, and—”
“You want to piss in the eye of the Nazis to celebrate a glorified jailbreak?”
“Spoken like a gendarme . . .”
He looms over me. It used to be that he treated me like some skittish animal he cornered who might bolt if he made a wrong move. But we’re more accustomed to each other now, and I’ve come to like the scent of him, all leather and pine. “I don’t argue with you about much, Marthe. But to march on Bastille Day is a stupid risk to take for a stupid symbol.”
I should agree. I’m annoyed that I don’t. But on the illicit radio we listen to in secret, we’re hearing that de Gaulle’s Free French are going to swathe Algiers in the tricolor for the holiday. And the Resistance has put up flyers asking us to show our solidarity. It isn’t just a stupid symbol for them, so how can it be for us? “Chavaniac’s a small village,” I argue. “The Germans have forgotten we exist. It’s a small risk to take when other people are doing more.”
“Like who?” he snaps.
“Like Jean Moulin.” Everyone is talking about the Resistance leader recently captured and tortured in Lyon. Especially the boys in the preventorium. To keep from betraying others, Moulin ate papers before he was captured. The Gestapo beat him to death with chair legs, and he never gave up a single name. Not one.