I nod dumbly, taking my folder.
“I’m counting on your discretion about what you just overheard,” she says.
I nod again, but the news of Madame Simon’s dismissal is already all over the castle. It spreads like wildfire, leaping from tower to tower, when her assistant resigns in solidarity. The overseer of the boys’ preventorium also throws her resignation onto the baron’s desk. And Sam tells me Madame LeVerrier made such a fuss that the school might soon be without a doyenne.
The staff doesn’t want to go to Anna’s Wednesday-night billiards game, but it doesn’t seem fair to take out our anger at the baron on his daughter. All Anna has ever done is made life livable around here, after all. If it weren’t for her, my sketches of Adrienne would never hang in the entryway of the castle. Besides, sometimes I feel halfway smitten with Anna, so I go to keep her company, leaning against the billiards table as she confides, “This is all so unfair . . . everyone is furious with Papa because they think he fired Madame Simon for being a Jew, but he doesn’t want to hurt her reputation by explaining she’s a thief.”
Is she a thief? Now that the shock has started to wear off, I’m thinking about all those times Madame Simon took money from the cashbox to send me or someone else to get supplies from the black market. And I’m starting to wonder . . .
Anna takes my silence for judgment. “The defeat has made people crazy, made them do things they would never otherwise do. I’m sure she’d never steal from the preventorium unless she was desperate.”
I tell myself it’s none of my business and that I need to remember the orphan’s code . . . Look out for me, myself, and I. But in the end I go looking for Madame Simon at her stone house in the village. When she’s not there, I go back to the castle and find her in the square tower, packing her office.
“I’ve been thinking about the black market,” I say. “I’m not going to ask you who else you sent or how much you spent . . . but did you really take money for your son-in-law?”
Madame Simon stuffs her owl lighter into a crate. “I wish I did. He’s been missing since May, when thousands of Jewish men were rounded up by French police in Paris.”
My mouth goes dry. “I-I’m so sorry. I didn’t know . . .”
“I told my daughter not to stay in Paris, but she didn’t believe harm could come to good, respectable people. Now her husband will be put to hard labor in those camps. Or so the authorities say. In truth, I’m terrified it will be worse than that.”
What does she believe we’re doing to people in those camps? This summer, Churchill announced on the BBC, “Scores of thousands of executions in cold blood are being perpetrated by the German police troops upon the Russian patriots . . . We are in the presence of a crime without a name.” But that is Russia . . . this is France. “We should tell all this to the baroness,” I say. “Remind her that extra sugar and medicines had to come from somewhere last winter!”
“Don’t be foolish, Marthe. The baroness is sympathetic, but the last thing the baron wants to hear is that we’ve been breaking the law by trading on the black market while he’s negotiating with the Vichy government for funding. He’ll fire me, you, and everyone else involved.”
I bite my lip. “He’s that heartless?”
Her nostrils flare as if she wants to say yes. Then her shoulders sag. “No. Amaury de LaGrange is arrogant and prejudiced, but he wants to protect this institution. He’s right to say my presence endangers the children in the preventorium.”
“That’s not true.”
She says, very sternly, “It is. And I’m not going to let years of hard work go down the drain with me. This castle is too important.”
I don’t know about that—but I guess there’s no point in my moaning about how unfair it all is if she’s determined to keep a stiff upper lip, so I swallow, hugging my arms. “Where will you go?”
“To Lisbon, if my daughter will come with me and I can get travel papers. I used to edit a magazine, and now there’s a need for someone to tell the world what’s happening here in France in no uncertain terms.”
I nod numbly, wishing I could go with her.
“But first, I must apologize to you, Marthe,” Madame Simon says. “I was wrong to tell you we couldn’t help that poor child you found at Madame Pinton’s farm. If I’d done as you suggested, little Gabriella Kohn could be safely here now instead of begging medical treatment for the price of a cabbage. I made some inquiries—and as my last official act, I’m going to admit her to the preventorium under a different name, as you suggested. I’ve already talked to Dr. Boulagnon and Dr. Anglade, and they’ve agreed to go along, but I dared not involve my successor. She’s not likely to overlook missing paperwork, and it wouldn’t be fair to ask her to do so. That’s where you come in.”